On Sunday, 60 Minutes profiled Moussa Diawara, a deported Texas father of two. The segment sympathetically claimed he feared returning to Mali partly because he had converted to Christianity. It told viewers the Department of Homeland Security questioned his credibility, yet it never mentioned that his 2012 immigration application claimed he was gay and feared persecution for it. A DHS spokesperson told the New York Post that CBS learned of the claim two weeks before airtime. CBS didn’t immediately respond to the outlet.
I wasn’t in that control room, and Diawara may have a perfectly good explanation. Big media outlets seldom need to invent a fact. A splice, a headline, or a missing paragraph builds the narrative for them. I’m a husband, a father of three sons and a lifetime observer of the manipulations of the mainstream media.
Consider October 2020. The New York Post published emails it said came from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Politico then ran the headline “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The letter behind it, signed by 51 former intelligence officials, said the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The same letter admitted the signers did not know whether the emails were genuine and had no evidence of Russian involvement. The headline promoted a hunch to a finding, and Joe Biden cited the story in a presidential debate. Signer James Clapper later said Politico “deliberately distorted what we said.”
Twitter blocked users from sharing the story, and its former executives later told Congress the decision was a mistake. By 2022, experts hired by the Washington Post verified thousands of the emails, though they couldn’t authenticate the entire collection.
George Orwell described the mechanism in 1945. In his proposed preface to Animal Farm, he wrote that unpopular ideas can be silenced and “inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” Bernard Goldberg, a longtime CBS correspondent, made the same point about his own industry in his book Bias. Reporters don’t sit in dark corners plotting slant: “It comes naturally to most reporters.” Newsrooms full of like-minded people coming from the same journalism schools mistake shared assumptions for neutrality.
The record keeps growing. Last November, the BBC apologized for a Panorama edit that spliced together remarks made nearly an hour apart in President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 speech, and conceded it gave a mistaken impression of a direct call for violence. In 2024, ABC settled with Trump by paying $15 million toward his presidential library after George Stephanopoulos repeatedly said Trump had been found liable for rape, which the Associated Press called inaccurate. In 2021, The Washington Post quoted Trump telling a Georgia investigator to “find the fraud,” then corrected the story once a recording surfaced. He had said she would find “dishonesty.”
Gallup found that only 33% of Americans trust the mass media, up from a record-low 28% last year, while another 33% say they trust it not at all.
Skeptics will say every outlet makes mistakes, and they’re right. Provenance concerns about the laptop were legitimate, and DHS disclosing details from a confidential asylum file raises its own questions. I can’t prove motive in any of these cases, and the strongest examples rest on admissions by the outlets themselves. But admissions arrive late, after the narrative has done its work.
TO PUNISH TRUMP, LEGACY MEDIA CUT THE FEED ON THE AMERICAN PUBLIC — AND CALLED IT ‘DEMOCRACY’
Marcus Aurelius gave newsrooms a standard two thousand years ago: “If it is not true, do not say it.” The Society of Professional Journalists says ethical journalism should be “accurate, fair and in context.” I want corrections that run as prominently as the error, and I reward outlets that post full transcripts and unedited video. Louis Brandeis wrote that sunlight is “said to be the best of disinfectants,” and a transcript is cheap sunlight.
CBS can start this week. Tell viewers what DHS says the application claimed, let Diawara respond, and let the audience decide. In Wall Street, Gordon Gekko said the most valuable commodity is information. Whoever edits it holds the power. Don’t hand it over for free.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.