Media Fails Of 2022: A Look Back At A Year’s Worth Of Gaffes And Flubs

Even if the information was not all that everyone knew, 2022 taught a lot to the left-leaning media.

Two years after local officials closed schools, grieving family members weren’t allowed to say goodbye to their loved ones at in-person funerals, businesses were forced to temporarily close their doors — many of them for good — and Americans were generally forbidden from congregating outside of large groups, the press in recent weeks has come to an unexpected conclusion: Fighting each other over COVID is probably counter-productive.

“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” The Atlantic published a headline on October 31, which exhorted readers to follow the doctor’s COVID instructions. This call was only matched in its temerity by 2020’s flipside. Back then, of course, the prevailing line from the mainstream media was that Dr. Fauci’s COVID pronouncements were to be followed to the letter and that there was no legitimate alternative path — until, that is, the doctor decides to change his mind, and woe betide the man or woman who asks to see the receipts.

It’s not surprising that 2022, when all things are considered, was just as jam-packed with examples of The Fourth Estate clowning around as any other year. Few if any of the year’s media fails, though, arguably came with a greater lack of self-awareness than that one from The Atlantic, calling on us all to basically hug out the COVID fights.

“Dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop,” The writer of the piece stated. “Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.”

Yes. The mistakes of history. Deep uncertainty, and complicated choices — like the choice to use one’s position as a public health professional to declare on CNN that the unvaccinated should not be allowed to leave their homes. Pandemic amnesty seems simple enough until you realize that it is not. “complicated choices” are one thing — but you unilaterally declaring my livelihood and personal liberty subservient to your real-time experiment amid all that uncertainty is something else entirely.

That kind of years-late turnabout, long after the damage has already been done, was just one in what’s been a lengthy series of gaffes, errors, and outright fails that characterize 2022’s Year in Media.

This same phenomenon was also evident in coverage of the pandemic. Like in the way the mainstream media was glaringly late to the party regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop — long after widespread coverage of the story might have made a difference in the 2020 election.

Facebook banned any mention of the laptop story in its social media network just ahead of the 2020 elections. Outlets like CNN and The Washington Post either refused to cover the news or played it down, while Twitter went even farther — taking the extraordinary step of refusing to let users share any links to news coverage about the laptop At allThis is true even if private messages are exchanged between users. Twitter is temporarily locked the then-White House press secretary Her account to try to disseminate news articles about the laptop.

Fast-forward to 2022, with a brash and anti-woke new owner now in charge of Twitter — and Twitter’s former head of safety Yoel Roth was now (surprise!) feeling compelled to declare Twitter’s ban on the laptop story a mistake. In fact, Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, described the situation at the time as “a” “manufactured crisis” somehow — two years later, long after it mattered most — became “not just a right-wing media story” anymore. Outlets such as CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times also ceased to exist at different times this year. agreed on the legitimacy These are the so-called ‘laptop from hell.’

It seems 2022 has been also the year that national legacy media decided to declare the Hunter Biden laptop-story amnesty.

Simply put, it has not been a year where the news media got things wrong as usual. When it comes to some of the biggest stories of our time, the profession also has an increasingly frequent habit of fighting alternatives that don’t fit the master narrative by plugging its ears, waiting an extended period of time, and then begrudgingly acknowledging the obvious after a consequence-free pivot.

There were also many other obvious and outright failures. The most shocking of 2022:

1) Headline: A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people

What actually happened?: For many experts, this has been the nightmare scenario of the Ukraine war — A provocation against a third-party nation that requires a response from allies and pulls other nations around the world into the conflict. The truth is that there was an error in Ukraine.

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