The media hold the powerful to account — except when we don’t

They say our news media, as it currently exists, is essential for holding the powerful to account. That would be true ideally, but it is not true of the news media we have. The media we have are much more interested in promoting a specific narrative and worldview, and it will treat very kindly anyone who helps in that project — no matter how much of a crank or liar they happen to be.

A good recent example of this was the New York Times’ eulogy for Paul R. Ehrlich, the man most famous for being wrong about everything. The Times described as merely “premature” his comically flawed and disastrously popular prediction that overpopulation would cause mass food shortages, depleted resources, riots, and ultimately global famine by the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1970 specifically, Ehrlich predicted four billion people would die over the next 20 years due to food and resource shortages.

The world’s population has grown by 134 percent since Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” was published 58 years ago. And not only are we still waiting for those global food riots, but we live in unprecedented abundance. Global extreme poverty declined in all but six of the 70 years between 1950 and 2019, and it is now at its lowest level in history.

Although it’s funny that one person can be so wrong about so many things, it’s less amusing when you realize how much Ehrlich’s bogeyman routine influenced public policy. Some people even choose not to have children out of fear that they would contribute to an overpopulation disaster.

Ehrlich wasn’t just wrong but horribly wrong, and with disastrous consequences. He is one of history’s great villains. But to hear the Times describe him at his passing, you would think he was both brilliant and mostly right.

Instead of portraying him accurately as a loon and a miserable scaremonger — which he certainly was — we are simply told that he faced some criticism over the years from “conservatives and academic rivals.”

At what point is mercy toward cranks cruelty to the public? The media have not been this forgiving since Anthony Fauci rode off into the sunset with his $400,000-a-year taxpayer-funded pension.

That episode of media “mercy” was arguably worse than what we’re seeing now for Ehrlich. Unlike the supposed expert on overpopulation, Fauci wasn’t merely wrong about key aspects of his supposed field of expertise — from the effectiveness of masks to those completely arbitrary and nonscientific social distancing rules. It also seems clear that he outright lied about many things, including the extent to which the U.S. was funding gain-of-function virus research in the Chinese city where the first COVID cases were identified.

Yet the media’s treatment of Fauci hasn’t been to challenge authority, but to discourage uncomfortable questions. Those who persisted in asking the obvious risked being labeled racists or fringe conspiracy theorists by our nation’s most prestigious newspapers, or even being censored by the Biden Justice Department. To this day, our esteemed news media treats this effort to silence you as a good and noble thing.

And this shameful display of tribal loyalty and ignorance allowed China’s regime — responsible for a virus that killed an estimated seven million people and counting — to evade international accountability. Instead of demanding answers from Fauci, especially when his public statements about gain-of-function research began to contradict each other, our media looked the other way. And that is to say nothing of the social pressures our major news outlets applied to follow the “Calvinball” social distancing guidelines — which could of course be violated safely only to participate in Black Lives Matter protests.

It is even clearer now with the benefit of hindsight, but as I wrote in 2020, no “institution has failed the public worse than the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic.” How many media-created “heroes” of that era went on to flame out spectacularly?

The much-vilified President Trump went on to spearhead Operation Warp Speed, which brought a vaccine to market in record time. Meanwhile, members of the press would go on to discover gradually that their preferred pandemic hero, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), had inadvertently ordered the deaths of thousands of elderly people, which he apparently did between bouts of sexually harassing his staff.

One common response to criticism of the false prophets in our elite institutions is that such complaints are short-sighted and ungrateful. You’re upset that there was no tornado in D.C. after so much media hype? That there have been no global food riots? Of course not. But that doesn’t make our media any less untrustworthy for endorsing so many ignorant cranks.

It is remarkable that we will face similar weather scares again very soon, with zero introspection applied to prevent repeat incidents. What is even more remarkable is that many of the same people who couldn’t predict the weather even 24 hours in advance will still look you straight in the eye and insist that their 10-year climate change models are beyond reproach.

The science is settled. You trust the science, don’t you?

The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account by looking at the facts and asking the inconvenient questions. Unfortunately, they are a lot better at enforcing groupthink, and they do it especially well when the group’s thinking is wrong.

T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.