The top nine worst media moments of 2021
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opini...moments-of-2021
by Becket Adams, Senior Commentary Writer | 
| December 31, 2021 04:58 PM

It was not a good year for the national press.

From the Chris Cuomo scandal to corporate journalists inventing stories about violent Border Patrol agents and Republican-led witch hunts, 2021 marked yet another lousy year in media credibility.

Indeed, if 2021 proved anything, it’s that corporate newsrooms are perfectly content to burp out the same nonsense, make the same mistakes, embrace the same ignorance, overlook the same ethical lapses, and parrot the same partisan talking points that have made them about as distrusted as Congress.

The following is a list of the worst major media moments of 2021. For brevity’s sake, the list has been narrowed to just nine examples. To include all errors, blunders, and acts of outright media malfeasance would require thousands of additional words.

In no particular order:

1. The Washington Post’s Steele Dossier legacy

The Washington Post in November heavily amended roughly two years' worth of reporting on the infamous Steele Dossier, an opposition research project that is almost certainly a work of total fiction if not outright Russian propaganda.

Don’t cheer. Had the Washington Post applied more scrutiny to its coverage of the dossier, especially its core claims with many that are absurd on their face, it wouldn’t have had to issue multiple corrections and editor’s notes. The dossier was a dubious piece of work from the get-go. The fact major newsrooms didn’t treat it as such is on them.

The since-amended Washington Post articles, some of which have had entire passages retracted, originally identified businessman Sergei Millian as a key source for the dossier.

However, it’s increasingly likely he played no role in the dossier’s creation. In fact, the source that fed the wildest and still-uncorroborated claims-- excerpt, rest at link above --