You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice that, in recent weeks, at least one story every seven days or so has featured someone in the news media doing something just inexplicable, if not downright inexcusable.
The past week brought two such examples of this not-at-all encouraging trend.
The first came last Wednesday morning, when MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian jumped on the air during Peter Alexander’s show to break the scoop that FBI Director and frequent free government flyer, Kash Patel, had landed in Russia for meetings. His report cited two anonymous sources, noted that he had reached out to the FBI for comment, and added: “They have not gotten back to me.”
Friends, if you’ll permit us a small rant here, using some variant of the journalistic crutch “We have reached out for comment on this story (that we are presenting to you right now), but they have not gotten back to us” tacitly admits you have likely decided to go with what is likely a one-sided story. So you are trying to cover your proverbial buttocks by saying you have definitely tried to do your job, but the people who haven’t taken the time to get back to you on whatever your schedule is have almost certainly not done theirs.
At least not in time for whatever your deadline may happen to be.
But Ken Dilanian’s “breaking news” story got it wrong. Director Patel was nowhere near any part of the Russian state. Instead, he was at Liberty University in Lynchburg, in the Commonwealth of Virginia. That was, when we last checked, squarely in the United States. By early afternoon, Dilanian was back on the air explaining that his sources had told him Patel had landed in Russia for a trip previously reported, but that Patel “did not, in fact, land in Russia today.”
According to the excellent reporting of Natalie Korach for Status.news, MS NOW was not the only outlet to receive the bogus tip on Patel’s whereabouts, but it was the only one to report it—and later had to correct it. Korach’s story for Status says the situation led the network to launch an internal review of its reporting and approval process. This all comes as the network has been building its own newsgathering operation after separating a year ago from the NBC News resources it had accessed since it launched as MSNBC in 1996.
As you might imagine, given his history of outrage at all slights, real and imagined, Patel wasted little time turning the mistake into fodder for questioning why the network should be entitled to the public’s trust. The botched report by Dilanian, who often covers the FBI Director, is now the example of everything wrong with the outlet that has often been critical of Mr. Patel.
That outrage had barely begun to diminish by the weekend, when we saw a second example of a member of the press behaving…well, at least strangely.
Late Saturday night, veteran CBS News Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford took to X/Twitter to respond to a viral video from a town hall held by Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the US Senate, Abdul El-Sayed.
Some background: Dr. El-Sayed has been dogged by questions about whether he sympathizes with the Muslim Brotherhood since he ran for governor in 2018. His current Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, has claimed that El-Sayed “pledged his support” to the group, several branches of which the Trump administration designated as terrorist organizations in January.
To be clear, there is no credible reporting from any major news outlet showing El-Sayed himself has any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. (Recently surfaced posts by his half-sister claim their mother was involved with the group in Egypt in the 1970s, more than half a century ago.) He wrote about Egyptian politics in 2011, and those writings have been used to portray El-Sayed negatively, specifically in campaign commercials from his Republican opponent and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
At his Saturday town hall in Caro, Michigan, an attendee in the crowd yelled to Dr. El-Sayed, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” The candidate asked for the person’s name and fired back, “Why are you asking the question?” The audience member responded only with the first name “Tommy” and repeatedly insisted on his inquiry. El-Sayed responded quickly, saying, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” then delivered a five-minute dissection of why the question was obviously being asked because of his last name and appearance. “Tommy” tried gamely to press on and deliver a “gotcha” moment, then left the event. (Notably, independent journalist Marisa Kabas, writing in her publication The Handbasket, has since identified “Tommy” as a longtime Republican political operative named Thomas Teepell.)
CBS’s Jan Crawford enters the story by reposting the video of this town hall exchange, seemingly supporting “Tommy” in her comments and thanking him for “triggering” a “self-own” by the candidate. Crawford also suggested that she had to rewatch the video twice to catch the candidate’s “nanosecond” response that he indeed disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood.
Crawford later deleted the original post and posted this for her comments, stating: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”
At this point, we can only borrow the words of Marcia Brady (our favorite in “The Brady Bunch Movie”), who stated it best: “Sure, Jan.”
Don’t ask us to explain these examples of the press behaving badly, or any of the other recent ones that preceded these two. It’s baffling that, at this moment in the nation’s history, and with journalists needing to do their jobs, these glaring examples of self-inflicted wounds continue.
The easiest explanation is that the current demand on journalists—to produce quality, well-sourced reporting while also delivering instant breaking-news headlines and simultaneous analysis, in real time on all platforms—is unrealistic. Trying to do it all creates too many opportunities to “drop the ball.”
And unfortunately, this is no game.
Trust doesn’t disappear all at once. But each time it is chipped away at, it isn’t easily restored. Those who didn’t trust in the first place only have their skepticism confirmed. Those who might have trusted at one point now wonder why they did in the first place.
You want proof? The latest Gallup polling from September 2026 says that only 33% of those adults surveyed said they had either “a great deal” (6%) or “a fair amount” (27%) of trust in the news media. Meanwhile, others said they trusted the media “not very much” (33%) or “none at all” (another 33%).
Talk about a not-at-all encouraging trend.
The only bright spot is that people still say they trust their local media. Pew’s polling from a year ago found that 70% of respondents trusted their local news organizations—down from 82% on the same question in 2016. In last year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report, local TV news topped every category as the most trusted news source, but only 59% of people said so.
But before we see another local TV station promo beating the drum about “Trust is earned,” let us remember the better version of that saying: “Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.”
Especially when you keep behaving badly enough to give your critics this much ammunition.
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