So wrote Andrew Sullivan (Substack) in a passage quoted by Jonathan V. Last in "Andrew Sullivan and the Narrative of the 'MSM Narrative'/The narrative on MSM narratives is false" (Bulwark).
Last calls Sullivan's attack "nonsense," his point being that "the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that 'they' are feeding 'us' false narratives."
And it's easy for Last to dish up the false narratives Sullivan himself has served up: He called "people skeptical of the Iraq War as the 'Hate-America-First crowd,' he asserted "that Barack Obama would put an end to America’s culture wars," he pushed the notion "that Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and that 'the media' was complicit in this coverup."
Last writes:
The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. Jonathan Rauch talks about this at length in The Constitution of Knowledge—that the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation. Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.
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65 comments:
The "MSM" is owned by about 10 people.
It is the "Peer Reviewed" part of the media, the smaller outlets, that are demonstrating how Last is wrong.
"the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that 'they' are feeding 'us' false narratives."
Translation: All of the MSM lie at least some of the time.
Everybody takes a beating every once in awhile. But much of the media, NYT, Sullivan and Last seem to get it wrong on so many of the biggest issues. And what's this bullshit of peered review after publishing? The whole point of peer review is to check your work before publishing something blatantly wrong. That's a wide gap between science and journalism. The journalist's enterprise is more like its favorite hangout, social media. Be the first and say anything, as long as it brings the views and clicks.
the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion
could someone 'cherry-pick' some examples of the MSM being fair, or impartial?
I'd look, but i'm not fond of digging empty holes
Last skips over most of Sullivan's examples. I wonder why?
Last list examples of Sullivan using argument trying to persuade people and prognosticate about preferred policies, future events and their outcomes.
Sullivan cited examples of facts that were uniformly misstated or unchallenged across wide swaths of the main stream "news" business, essentially in lock-step with each other.
The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication.
You mean like what Andrew Sullivan is doing in this column, which Last criticizes him for?
Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.
Yeah, and journalists are like the first wave of Rangers coming ashore on D-Day.
Sullivan is correct, and Last is just an ass. The Russian Collusion hoax is the worst thing ever. 5 years of lies, with NYT and WaPo getting Pulitzers for their lies, which ruined many lives, spent millions of tax payer money for nothing, made American HATE the media and Politicians who lie to us all the time. When are they going to apologize to the American people?? When I was thinking of going into Journalism, NONE of these so called Journalists of today would have made it. They are activists...not journalists and everyone knows it. Journalism, and MEDIA are dead.
"[P]eer-reviewing takes place after publication".
No. That is why you have editors and fact-checkers on your staff. Those are your peers. Those are the people that are supposed to call you on your bullsh*t 'narratives'. If you don't have those people on your staff doing their job, you're just an effing gossip blog with creditability lower than the National Enquirer.
Here's the entirety of Sullivan's take down of the press.
one fine snip...
But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.
'Last calls Sullivan's attack "nonsense," his point being that "the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that 'they' are feeding 'us' false narratives."'
I guarantee all of those falsehoods were perpetuated by the NYT, WP, MSNBC, and CNN among others.
Those are the gold standard of the media, so not 'cherry-picking' in any way.
When you've lost Andrew Sullivan...
more.. from Sullivan:
Money quote from the defense lawyer: “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun (and your hands down) pointed at him, that he fired? Right?” To which Grosskreutz answered: “Correct.” Here’s how the NYT first described this a year ago, on August 26: “Video footage from the scene of the shooting appears to show Mr. Rittenhouse running and then firing his gun, striking a man in the head. He then flees and is chased by bystanders before tripping, falling to the ground and shooting another man.”
What is Last's position on the media's treatment of Adam Schiff, the Mueller investigation, and the laptop story? Oh, just occasional lapses by big media, I guess. Where are those corrections? Either non-existent or slow in coming. People like Rachel Maddow have disgraced themselves and should go to "The Young Turks" where they belong. Joy Reid belongs in a looney bin.
And to attack Andrew Sullivan by the "tu quoque" method is ridiculous. One thing is for sure: unlike NYT, WaPoop, CNN, MSNBC, ABCNBCCBS (and Fox News, WSJ, and NYPost), which are large news organizations with big staffs dedicated to collecting and publishing THE NEWS, Andrew Sullivan is just a guy. Sullivan is an opinion writer--like Jonathan Last. I think the big media should be held to a higher standard than Sullivan and Last. It is not a good argument for Last to defend big media by saying to Sullivan "you are another." In fact, it is ridiculous.
But the big media organizations have reduced themselves to propaganda organs for the Democrat Party. They are Pravda and Izvestia. Ugh!
more...
A day later, in another NYT piece (which I relied on at the time), here’s the account of video footage they embedded: “As Mr. Rittenhouse is running, he trips and falls to the ground. He fires four shots as three people rush toward him. One person appears to be hit in the chest and falls to the ground. Another, who is carrying a handgun [Grosskreutz], is hit in the arm and runs away.” Any sense of self-defense there? (And when you watch the full version of the same video on YouTube, you see that, for some reason, the NYT cut off the key moment showing Rittenhouse’s self-defense — the moment that proved so critical in court!)
NYT did what?
The media is a business. It organizes anxieties and tells you how to live with them. Your favorite narratives will always work whether they're true or not, just like fiction works for entertainment.
What it fails at is telling you what's important.
The "peer review" model does not apply when sympathetic news organizations and echo-chamber social media environments rapidly repeat and magnify unfounded claims without verification.
Twitter is aptly named, as flocks of birds "titter" each other's sounds to remain a flock and move together as a unit. Visit a zoo to hear for yourself. This is not peer review, this is primal and unthinking group unity.
If we limited news reporting to original sources and the narratives wouldn't have time to gain traction. This was the dominant norm before the 24 hour constant news cycle and the Drudge Report breaking the Lewinsky story over NBC's censorship in 1998. Now that peer review is gone, and publishing costs nothing, the mainstream media just repeats self-serving nonsense.
I've never really heard of Jonathan V. (is the V important?) Last. Is he insulting upwards here to become famous?
more from Sullivan:
We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”
The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.
This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.
this one from Sullivan gets a bold:
As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.
Last is just circling the wagons.
If you're promulgating legalized theft, why not practice lying, too? No biggie.
That Andrew Sullivan has in the past pushed fake news does not excuse Jonathan V. Last or any other writer or editor for The Bulwark from doing likewise. Nor writers for the Washington Post and New York Times.
And he’s right about the first people to push back on the Iraq Was being the “Hate America First” crowd.
Mueller.
Recall the blind-faith devotion for this man?
He fronted a total scam.
Rachel Maddow was the number one pimper of disinformation regarding Russia. She is paid 30 million dollars to lie to people and spread propaganda. She knows
she is a liar.
Who pays her? Where does that 30 million come from?
The real Russian collusion = Hillary Clinton. No one in the press talks about that fact.
Difference.
Supposedly, the scientists make mistakes. Sullivan's examples are deliberate lies.
Didn't the main stream media claim that the difference between them and bloggers was their layers and layers of fact checkers? Now this guy is saying that fact checking happens AFTER the story is perpetuated for 2-3 years, but that just proves the system works, or something.
The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication.
Repeating each other's lies is not like a giant peer-review system.
Andrew Sullivan is right: Ideology makes you believe and report stupid shit -- even if your name is Andrew Sullivan.
Whenever somebody gives 7 examples, at least 2 of them are going to be weak or stretches. That doesn't mean the argument isn't sound. Also, Sullivan's having been wrong at times does not mean that the media is doing a good job. It just means that he's not an exception.
Last writes:
The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. …
Except, of course, that it isn’t. Within living memory journalists were expected to confirm their stories with additional sources and newspapers would abjectly print corrections, and sometimes even apologies, when it turned out that they didn’t get it right. So it’s not true that our present approach to journalism is “the worst there is — except for all the others.” Within living memory they did it better.
Sorry, Last, but the peer-review should occur at the editor's desk of the NYT, WaPoo, etc. Those stories should never have seen the light of day. "Anonymous source" means no reliable source, possibly an even nonexistent source. All of these bogus stories lean one way: Demonize Donald Trump and Republicans.
The biggest example of these false stories is Hillary Clinton's Russiagate hoax. Obama and John Brennan knew it was a hoax immediately after HRC released it into the wild. They said nothing, their government promoted the story and used it to spy on the Trump campaign. Brennan went on MSNBC/CNN to promote the hoax. Neither MSNBC nor CNN cared to correct the record, but used it to undermine Trump. I've yet to hear Rachel Maddow issue a retraction. Evil people, all.
The scientific process only works if those using it are reasonably honest and willing to admit error. In fact, the good ones ask others to check their work and dig out error. Because as Richard Feynman said, "the easiest person to fool is yourself."
To a considerable degree I think --or at least hope-- that the scientific process does work. Although in certain domains such as "climate change" I think the rot is pretty deep and wide. Careers are built on grant-wangling, and grants are dispensed by people infected by politics, and there is a terrible tendency to count noses, as if truth could be found by consensus.
If "mainstream" journalism were at all similar to the scientific process, I would be delighted. But in fact it seems antithetical; and the dependence of scientists on favorable media coverage means that journalism is corrupting science. 'Twas ever thus, perhaps; but I think it's worse than usual these days.
Bottom line, "mainstream" journalists are IMHO very largely captive to the Prog ideology. "Democratic operatives with press credentials," I think Instapundit calls them.
Journalism used to have an ironclad dedication to the facts. Concepts like true and false are for philosophers not reporters. Reporters should stick to relating facts, the famous double-yous what who when how and if applicable and established why. And when it comes to opinion in “news” formats, those opinions should rely on known facts. Anonymous sources, secret “whistleblowers” and speculation are inappropriate. The profession of reporting may have jumped the shark, never to return. I don’t know. But it’s broken and these two guys are just talking past each other instead of demanding a return to first principles of journalism. Sad. Last wasted his reputation taking a nevertrump wrong turn by buying into the FBI/CIA/deep state BS on the former president.
Not hard to "cherry pick" when you look at the MSM and see an orchard full of cherry trees loaded with fruit.
The Asian massage parlor case is being pushed hard and fast in the courts as hate crime because of at least two prior crimes clearly motivated by black-on-white hate, where the killer announced he was going to kill white men, stabbed a white male stranger, then crushed the skull of his white jail inmate, then told police again that he did it because they were white men. No hate crime charges. Plus who knows how many gender animus cases directed randomly by men against women or minorities on whites.
Georgia wants its first hate criminal to be a white male, not a black male. And certainly not the first victims to be just heterosexual women. And the growing Asian and South Asian lobby have made it clear that they are as prejudiced as the Anti-Defamation League and the gay and black activists in seeking special status for themselves. The white woman and Hispanic man also killed in the massage parlor murders are being counted as lesser humans, with lesser sentences for their identical murders. By the same killer. And so the lynch mob re-emerges in Georgia, with offenders and victims judged in the courts by the color of their skin (or their sex). The local media, of course, remains totally submissive to the mob, questioning nothing.
"People who don't support the Iraq war are unpatriotic" is much much different than these specific college students raped this specific woman? One is capable of being true or false and one is obviously someone's opinion.
It bears pointing out that the 'culture' of the MSM is geared towards narratives that support a particular POV, and does little to atone for the mistakes that it makes.
Has any reporter apologized to Trump for asserting that he colluded with Russia? Has any reporter lambasted that Indian activist for falsely claiming that the Covington kid stared him down? Has any reporter apologized for pushing the narrative of 'Hands up, don't shoot", much less made clear that it was a fabrication?
There is no appetite in the MSM to do any of these things.
That Andrew Sullivan was once part of the problem in no way undermines his point.
Two leftists fighting about the right and how it is treated by the media.
I doubt much light will emerge from this fire.
Interesting then that the people who are the consumers of journalism today- the customers, the readers, the subscribers, the commenters- look very much more homogeneous when it comes to their opinion of journalists and the field of journalism today. They see journalists as one step above a slug. Lower than a Congressman. I'll repeat that. Journalists are viewed as lower than a Congressman. I mean, no one is held in less regard than a Congressman, isn't that right, Cori Bush?
Andrew Sullivan is late to the party, but correct (both of which are among his traits- being late to the reality, but eventually getting it right). That Jonathan V. Last still does not get the place we're in with our coverage of news shows that he is a paid up working member of that class of Journalists! who are grouped at that bottom rung of consumer opinions.
You would think a brick hitting someone in the head would get their attention. There is growing a new definition of the word "obtuse" and it could be hung around the necks of thousands of so-called journalists today.
the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation.
That might be true, but it's only because science is adopting the values of journalism.
"the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples" Therefore it is impossible to claim that there's a systematic bias so big that no sane person would trust them? Go ahead and trust them, if you are a fool. The rest of us have noticed that their bias is so profound as to make them useless.
The issue is when media are expressing opinion as fact and using the so-called facts to misinform people. Last seems to conflate opinion and reporting programs on Fox etc. There is no way to police this without obliterating the First Amendment. We need to teach school children how to read and listen to media reports so they are at least partly insulated from propaganda. I have known and practiced this since my high school days. Content moderation occurs at the consumer level, not the publisher level. Content moderation at the publisher level equals creation of narratives by eliminating opposing points of view. COVID information is exhibit 1.
"Last writes" heh
Wow, he actually defended democracy! (Which is, of course, not really our form of government, but still...)
But Last has no explanation for why all the major, culture-moving errors go in the same direction, it seems. Which is Sullivan's point.
Sullivan also calls himself out for his own overheated journalistic errors, and notes that journalists are incentivized to report fast, ahead of fact-finding. In essence, it appeared to me that Sullivan's theme is that modern journalists substitute their own biases and sense of narrative for a well-reported story, and too many journalists go in the same direction on that account (thank you, Woodward and Bernstein, for your legacy of journalistic activism - we definitely needed a couple of generations of journalists to believe their job was to Save the World instead of reporting the news).
Anybody know what's going on with that black high school kid who shot 4 people and got bailed out that day and had a party at his house. I keep hearing from the media that if Kyle was black, he would be in prison. Welllllll.......
I was a professional scientist before retiring. Peer review, as practiced and advertised, is bullshit through and through. I peer reviewed at least a hundred articles in my career- I still do, on occasion, get a request to review one even now in retirement. The problem is that if you don't actually replicate the results yourself, you can't actually be sure the paper you are reviewing is complete bullshit full of knowing lies. The best that a reviewer can do is question things are seemingly implausible on their face, and ask for additional information before approving for publication. In the end, I like the idea of just publishing stuff and letting people try to replicate the results and publishing those attempts of replication along side the original article (easy to do in the electronic world we now live in). In other words, no peer review before publication, the model the news media uses.
Here is the thing, though, and Last minimizes this and Sullivan does point it out- the mistakes all run one way, and no one ever apologizes or gives back awards on the stories they published that turned out to be bullshit and lies. At best, they go back and quietly edit their past stories to cover up their mistakes and lies that got uncovered. The media are largely swine.
Yes, Sullivan would have more standing if he weren't guilty of the exact same behavior in the past, but Sullivan actually does, on occasion, admit that he fucked it up royally. I have yet to see the Adam and Michelle Goldbergs (or insert any other reporter for the NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, etc.) actually do this.
"Jonathans" are as common in the media as they are among contemporary novelists, though I don't know what their common characteristics are apart from being male and usually white (or white-adjacent, like Jonathan Capehart).
Jonathan Last is a Bill Kristol hanger-on who wrote for the Weekly Standard and now edits The Bulwark. He also writes for Commentary. His quarrel with Sullivan looks like one neocon scavenger fighting another for the last bones of the ideology they once shared. Civil wars are the most bitter.
""Last writes" heh"
LOL
I didn't notice I'd done that.
"I've never really heard of Jonathan V. (is the V important?) Last."
To us law people, it makes a name look like the name of a court case. I'd omit the middle initial if mine were "V."
As it is, I skip my middle initial, but I have my reasons. (It's another "A.")
No. That is why you have editors and fact-checkers on your staff. Those are your peers. Those are the people that are supposed to call you on your bullsh*t 'narratives'. If you don't have those people on your staff doing their job, you're just an effing gossip blog with creditability lower than the National Enquirer.
Shorter Xmas: Organized crime can police itself just fine, thank you.
All the cherries seem to grow on one side of the tree.
Now why is that?
Ann,
Oooh, Triple-A! What is it? Alicia? Andromeda? Artemis? Antoinette?
Watch: Project Veritas, #Assange, and the Authoritarian Decree of Who Is a "Real Journalist" | Glenn Greenwald
when you corner the corrupt radical left with their lies - they turn around and tell you you're not a real journalist.
click the image to watch.
The media is supposed to report the news to me so (a) I am informed of the events of the day and (b) I can make intelligent decisions based on that information, whether that be in investing, voting, everyday life choices, etc.
A media that regularly gets major stories wrong is useless.
A media that regularly gets major stories wrong all with the same political bias is propaganda and is worse than useless.
A media that repeatedly lies to me is malicious and genuinely dangerous.
Unless Last wants to tell us that all these stories that Mr. Sullivan notes were not widespread falsehoods that were repeatedly endorsed by all the major players in the mainstream media - given I was not born yesterday I do clearly remember this occurring - I am not sure what his argument is. It seems to be gaslighting, if not full on delusion.
Given I have been seeing news reports on the Rittenhouse trial from major news organizations that clearly have no basis in reality and often go out of their way to not report the truth - lies essentially - nothing has changed. The mainstream media deserves no benefit of the doubt and should be reviled.
I've never really heard of Jonathan V. (is the V important?) Last. Is he insulting upwards here to become famous?
11/16/21, 8:59 AM
Last used to write a good deal for the Weekly Standard. In fact, I think he was an editor. My mind reading abilities tell me he is taking a strong stand against Sullivan’s narrative argument because the big whopper of all these narratives is Trump/Russia collusion. The Weekly Standard types are very heavily invested in that particular narrative – they need it to be thought of as something that responsible people could have reasonably believed in at the time.
I guess the V is as important as you want it to be. I take the general view that people can call themselves what they want.
Consistent with the Althouse asymmetry, The Sullivan piece is posted in the post about the rebuttal of the Sullivan piece…
From the post:
"Last calls Sullivan's attack "nonsense," his point being that "the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that 'they' are feeding 'us' false narratives." "
The "cherry-picking" comment is a tactic I've seen before, used by leftists in an attempt to discredit dissent. It's a logical fallacy not unlike ad hominem.
Stopped reading after he said the Smollett story wasn't an MSM narrative. C'mon. What a total clown.
Yancey Ward:
Here is the thing, though, and Last minimizes this and Sullivan does point it out- the mistakes all run one way, and no one ever apologizes or gives back awards on the stories they published that turned out to be bullshit and lies. At best, they go back and quietly edit their past stories to cover up their mistakes and lies that got uncovered. The media are largely swine.
********************
I wonder how many of those charged with "correcting" their stories by air-brushing out the lies and mistakes have read "1984", and understand that THEY are the embodiment of Winston Smith---minus, of course his secret rebelliousness and disgust at having to serve the Party.
we definitely needed a couple of generations of journalists to believe their job was to Save the World instead of reporting the news).
One important response to these self appointed guardians, is to remind them, or most likely educate them, about the real meaning of the phrase "freedom of the press" in the First Amendment.
When the First Amendment was written the word "press' was not used to refer to people or a profession. The word "press" literally meant the machinery necessary to publish and disseminate your ideas. Remember the people who wrote and passed the First Amendment were the same people who started or bought newspapers to launch political attacks upon each other. The Founders would be amused at the idea that they were creating a form of protection for newspaper writers and TV talking heads.
In fact I thing a credible argument can be made that the original intent of the First Amendment would allow the government to force Facebook, Youtube and the rest to become public utilities like power, water and waste.
OK, Sullivan has made his own mistakes -- the year he spent trying to be Sarah Palin's OB-GYN being the nadir -- but he isn't "cherry-picking" those MSM missteps; they were all major stories. (Yes, even the Wi "transphobic" story, which Last assumes we have none of us heard about unless we're too wired-in to the Intertubez to bother about). And Sullivan's point was that all of these stories are slanted in one direction.
And Last is just being silly when he recalls old MSM screwups. He says that Duranty's hideous coverup of the Ukrainian famine has been "fixed." How? Did the NYT give up its Pulitzer for that? No? Then "fixed" it isn't. For that matter, the NYT is holding on tight to Nikole Hannah-Jones's (Ida Bae Wells's?) Pulitzer for the 1619 Project, though the central claim that the US colonies fought England so they could hold onto slavery has been silently withdrawn. Pulitzers: The gift that keeps on giving!
His reasoning is that it's okay if the mainstream news makes a few mistakes because Sullivan has too? Sullivan has had some nutty ideas, but that doesn't make him wrong here.
The problem with the MSM is that it wasn't one or two news outlets saying those things, it was a massive dog pile each time. Every single one of the news stories mentioned here had odd things that made the narrative questionable from the beginning, but the people that we pay to ask questions just accepted the initial stories and ignored anything that didn't make sense.
Yancey: great comments. The problem of irreproducibility of results is real. Ioannidis has shown that. Your suggestion seems like a healthy way forward. Could not there be a simple database that showed readers of scientific papers not just the number of citations, but the number of times the work had been replicated or attempted, and how many times it had not, with name rank and serial number?
May I ask what your area of scientific operations was/is?
As a psychiatric social worker for forty years, I can speak with some authority about what that sector of liberals believes. They believe all this crap. It's not cherry-picking when those are the cherries that go into the pie.
Gahrie said…"In fact I thing a credible argument can be made that the original intent of the First Amendment would allow the government to force Facebook, Youtube and the rest to become public utilities like power, water and waste."
Especially waste.
Last's assertion that the media sometimes gets things "wrong" is disingenuous. The media lies, repeatedly, to push their narrative. As gilbar said: "could someone 'cherry-pick' some examples of the MSM being fair, or impartial?"
As a scientist, I take offense at the comparison of what the media does as scientific peer-review, though Kevin has a cogent observation: "That might be true, but it's only because science is adopting the values of journalism."
I think Yancey sells peer-review short, though he is certainly correct that its ability to detect fraud is limited. Unfortunately, replication experiments are rarely possible due to time, funding, and access to equipment. At its best, peer-review can improve publications by checking for faulty logic, editing for clarity, and bringing previous literature to the attention of the authors. I think it would be a grave mistake to discard it.
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