> It is not hard to find examples of how far we have strayed from reporting standards in the Trump era. A simple example is Time Magazine falsely reporting on President Donald J. Trump’s first day in office, stating that he’d removed a statue of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. The news went viral. But the writer did not follow the most basic rule of journalism — pick up the phone and ask the White House if it was really gone, and why? The writer late wrote a correction on his Twitter account, stating “The MLK bust is still in the Oval Office. It was obscured by an agent and door.”
There are numerous examples. Most recently the entire media running with a Buzzfeed story to the tune of "Trump is finished" that Mueller himself disputed, or the stuff about the MAGA hat kids that allegedly surrounded and mocked a Native American peace activist (turns out he had muscled his way into their gathering and was physically intimidating them, but the press ran with a selectively edited video and didn't bother corroborating it). This is stuff that gets widespread coverage before any journalist bothers with due diligence.
I think it's a shame because a free press is one of the only ways to keep the government in check but they are shredding their own credibility, apparently because of personal biases (but who really knows), and the result of that is a government that can rightfully dismiss a lot of what gets reported. How do you recover after "crying wolf" too many times?