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The Biggest Media Fails Of 2024

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Morning Wire host Georgia Howe and Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham on a New Year’s Day edition of Morning Wire. 2024 saw Americans’ trust in the legacy media sink to all-time lows, contributing to massive layoffs and loss of audience among some of the ...

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Jan 1, 2025 - 10:28
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The Biggest Media Fails Of 2024

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Morning Wire host Georgia Howe and Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham on a New Year’s Day edition of Morning Wire.

2024 saw Americans’ trust in the legacy media sink to all-time lows, contributing to massive layoffs and loss of audience among some of the biggest news outlets. These were the media’s failures over the last year that likely played a role in this lack of trust. 


GEORGIA: Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham joins us now to look back at the year’s biggest media fails that are contributing to the public’s record-low trust. But Megan, before we get to that, can you give us a quick overview of where the industry stands now? Along with a lot of controversies and corrections, there was also a lot of contraction for an election year when you typically see news departments expanding.

MEGAN: Yeah, the media landscape looks bad. Really bad. If you remember, Georgia, right before the start of the year we saw substantial layoffs at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NPR. And as you said, that’s not what you expect to see heading into a major campaign year, when media revenues tend to increase.

Then in January, the Los Angeles Times cut more than 20% of its newsroom. Time Magazine cut 15%. And that bad news just continued throughout 2024. In the summer, CNN laid off 100 people. And they’re now reportedly planning to lay off hundreds more. Comcast may sell MSNBC.

And neither of those developments is surprising when you look at some of the cable news ratings. They’re a dumpster fire. According to Nielsen data, MSNBC is still down by more than half of what it was averaging up to election night, and CNN is down by slightly less than half, though it didn’t have as far to fall because it was already at the bottom of the pack.

Fox News ratings are way up this year. They’re now beating the ratings of the other cable news outlets combined, suggesting a lot of former CNN and MSNBC viewers are flocking there.

GEORGIA: Well let’s talk about some of the coverage that’s likely driving a lot of the legacy media’s poor performance. When you look back over the year, what are the biggest standouts to you?

 MEGAN: For me, the biggest one wasn’t an issue where there was clear deception or inaccuracy, but just appallingly callous coverage of the most momentous moment of the campaign. And that was the response to the attempt on President-elect Donald Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13th. 

That very same night, ABC viewers heard George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz, in part, blaming the victim. 

And then on the print front, the day after Butler, The Atlantic ran a piece that said that the “bloodshed Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well.”

In September when there was a second assassination attempt at Trump’s golf course, you heard similar rhetoric from major media. Almost immediately after news of that second assassination attempt broke, MSNBC anchor Alex Witt asked political analyst Elise Jordan this: 

Also that same night, we had this from NBC anchor Lester Holt:

We need to remember that we’re talking about the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years. So you can imagine how this struck at least half the country. And I have to imagine there were probably people watching who didn’t vote for Trump but nonetheless found this kind of commentary troubling.

And it’s the kind of thing that is very hard to come back from. It’s not a mistake, it’s a level of bias that’s much more off-putting.

GEORGIA: Yes, that brings to mind some of the media commentary we’ve heard in just the last couple of weeks surrounding the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, with some minimizing the horrific crime or even making light of it. So what’s your second biggest media fail of 2024? 

MEGAN: Well, I almost made this number one because it was such a systemic failure and involved such obvious deception. And that was the media’s insistence throughout the spring and much of the summer that President Biden was not suffering from any mental infirmity when it was obvious to the American people that he was.

So let’s look at MSNBC. In June, anchor Nicole Wallace blamed the Biden appearances that were alarming the public on selectively edited clips.

Interesting there that Wallace tried to claim Trump was having the same lapses, but those claims have disappeared now that the election is over. Wallace’s colleague, Joe Scarborough, also sought to assure viewers that Biden was fine.

I mean the list of legacy outlets that dismissed the videos of Biden seeming lost and confused that Americans could see with their own eyes is a really long one. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, the AP, and NBC all called these videos “cheap fakes,” meaning misleading edits of real video.

And when Karine Jeane-Pierre leaned into that narrative during White House press briefings, it looked like a collaborative effort between the media and the Biden administration.

Well, Biden’s disastrous debate performance at the end of June made it impossible to deny his mental state and made it clear he had no chance of winning. Then, the coverage changed immediately and many media outlets began calling for him to step aside. Just one example, on June 21st, The New York Times ran a story which reported that any claims that Biden was suffering from diminished faculties were because of these cheap fakes.

Two weeks later, the day after the debate, they ran an editorial calling on him to step down due to his mental lapses. And this was really the pattern you saw with the legacy outlets across the board.

GEORGIA: Okay how about number three?

MEGAN: Well, I still don’t think we can get away from the election yet because the most glaring were the fact checks. Especially during the debates.

For instance, at the ABC debate between Trump and Harris, moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked numerous times, including when Trump was generally correct. Like when he said, “Hard to believe, they have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth.” Davis broke in:

Now this is a pretty semantic fact-check, because Harris’ own running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, helped repeal a state law that required doctors to render medical aid to a baby that survives an abortion. So in Minnesota, doctors can let born babies die. And that has happened in at least eight cases in that state. New York and Illinois also repealed laws that require medical care for babies that survive abortion.

By the same token, ABC never fact-checked Harris despite the fact that Harris made a number of false claims, like saying that there are no members of the U.S. military on active duty in a combat zone anywhere around the world. In fact, there are 3,000.

After the same debate, Time Magazine wrote that Trump’s claim that Harris supported funding sex changes for illegal immigrants was false. It wasn’t, and Time later had to issue a correction.

So that looked to a lot of people like glaring bias. And we saw something similar with NBC and the vice presidential debate. Moderator Margaret Brennan interrupted JD Vance as he was referencing undocumented immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

So again, a lot of viewers detected bias in that exchange.

Then there are the ethical issues in the media’s favorable treatment of Harris. MSNBC host Al Sharpton, for instance, did not disclose that the Harris campaign made a $500,000 donation to his nonprofit right before he conducted a softball interview with the candidate.

Meanwhile, 60 Minutes was caught having edited their interview with Harris to make what were some pretty meandering, confusing answers to questions more comprehensible. CBS then ignored widespread calls to release the full transcript of the interview.  

GEORGIA: So were most of these fails related to the election?

MEGAN: Definitely, because that dominated the news cycle for the year, but it wasn’t exclusively election moments. When it came to the war in Gaza, major outlets had major egg on their faces when it was revealed that they’d been using inaccurate statistics provided by Hamas, which has of course been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.

Outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and AP took data disseminated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas, at face value and passed it along to their audiences. For instance, they reported fatality numbers for Palestinian women and children that a later study found were mathematically impossible. So in essence, they aided Hamas’ PR campaign.

This kind of credulity when it comes to war coverage led to a really embarrassing incident for CNN just recently. 

On December 11th, the network ran a story from foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward in which she encountered a man in an empty Syrian prison. He told her he’d been detained by the Assad regime for months.

Well, when CNN posted the video to social media, users immediately pointed out how inauthentic the man’s appearance and behavior seemed. Like something out of a low-budget movie. 

Sure enough, within days, a Syrian fact-checking site revealed that the man was really a former intelligence officer for the Assad government. And plenty of people rightly questioned why CNN didn’t take more time verifying the man’s identity before they rushed the story to air.

GEORGIA: Have we seen any admission from legacy outlets that these kinds of mistakes and biases have cost them?  

MEGAN: Not so much from the journalistic class, though Chris Cilizza, formerly of CNN, did issue a mea culpa a few days ago. 

In 2021, he said Republicans trying to “make Biden’s mental capacity an issue” were engaging in “lowest common denominator politics.” 

But on December 19th, he said this. 

And a couple of their owners have. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has promised that his paper will strive for more balanced coverage going forward. So has the owner of the Los Angeles Times.

But when it comes to those actually telling the stories, their mea culpas have mostly been forced. Sunny Hostin, co-host on ABC’s “The View,” had to read a similar disclaimer only a few weeks later after comments she made about Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

And I’ll leave you with one more media fail, Georgia. If it’s not the biggest of the year, it’s certainly the most expensive.

Back in March, during an interview with South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, ABC Anchor George Stephanopoulos made this claim about Donald Trump multiple times.

Except, that was not true. And reportedly, Stephanopoulos’ producer warned him repeatedly, including in writing, not to make that claim on the air. Stephanopoulos did it anyway, Trump sued, and just a few days ago, ABC agreed to pay $16 million dollars to settle. ABC and Stephanopoulos issued a joint statement saying they “regret” the anchor’s statements regarding President Donald J. Trump. 

GEORGIA: Well, it will be interesting to see if all the bad press causes the media to turn over a new leaf. Thanks, Megan.

MEGAN: Anytime. 

The Daily Wire
Originally Published at Daily Wire, World Net Daily, or The Blaze

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Fibis
Fibis I am just an average American. My teen years were in the late 70s and I participated in all that that decade offered. Started working young, too young. Then I joined the Army before I graduated High School. I spent 25 years in, mostly in Infantry units. Since then I've worked in information technology positions all at small family owned companies. At this rate I'll never be a tech millionaire. When I was young I rode horses as much as I could. I do believe I should have been a cowboy. I'm getting in the saddle again by taking riding lessons and see where it goes.

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