Why does mass media have such a garbage legacy?

The now 161-year-old daily newspaper spent decades reinforcing the racial divide in a state founded as whites-only, fomenting the racism that people of color faced.

It excused lynching. It promoted segregation. It opposed equal rights for women and people of color. It celebrated laws to exclude Asian immigrants. It described Native Americans as uncivilized, saying their extermination might be needed.

Source: Publishing Prejudice: The Oregonian’s Racist Legacy :: The Oregonian/OregonLive

Their series continues, admitting they are historically a racist xenophobic newspaper. They acknowledge it took them 50 years to admit to their history.

• Publishing Prejudice: The Oregonian’s Racist Legacy :: The Oregonian/OregonLive – they advocated for internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry during WW II. Their reporter on concentration camps never visited the subject of his writing and the paper lied about camp conditions; he later rose up to be editor of the racist rag, the Oregonian.
• Publishing Prejudice: Accountability for the past and future :: The Oregonian/OregonLive – Despite their past racist history they will continue to have editorials by their editorial board – even though they note it does conflict with their pretend stance that they are unbiased. Continuing the editorial operation is a form of propaganda – as they pretend to keep opinions separate from news reporting. They will continue to use their elite status in the community to tell everyone else how to live. What will they promote today that turns out to be viewed as nonsense in the future?
• Editor apology.

In 2018, National Geographic admitted to a long history of fake reporting and deliberate racism and misrepresentation of other cultures, intentionally presenting other cultures as primitive societies. See: National Geographic spent decades as a racist reporter of life – and that is their own conclusion

How can we ever trust them?

Have they changed their ways – or merely changed their targets and methods?

In the last two years, much media reporting on Covid policies lacked skepticism – instead they were cheerleaders and stenographers for since discredited policies and censored those who asked reasonable questions, labeling those who questioned anything as purveyors of misinformation or disinformation

Where was the Oregonian when thousands of state employees and health care workers were fired for not getting a vaccine that today is acknowledged not to stop the transmission of Covid-19?  Today Oregon has a shortage of health care workers.

In the spring of 2020, Oregon shut down access to all non-life-threatening health care. Months later we learned this was due to a defective and fraudulent disease model from Christopher Murray’s University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Did the media skeptically question that? At the time, no. (I suffered a broken foot and had to wait ten weeks for diagnosis and too late to do anything for it – now in late 2022, I still suffer pain in my foot every day. Because of a fraudulent IHME model that led to stupid public health policies that never considered the costs of their policy. These actions were cheered on by the media who dug deep into hysterical, fear-based reporting – never helpful nor hopeful.)

Oregon media became cheerleaders and failed to skeptically question the underlying assumptions. Indeed, journalists are afraid to ask hard questions of those with advanced degrees in technical subjects.

Perhaps in a few decades they will apologize for this failure?

How can we ever view journalism as a reliable source of information?