Ed just wrote an excellent piece on the "Biden Nightmare" being an anvil around the neck of the Democrats. 

And it is true that both the media and the Democrats have taken a major hit in their approval ratings, and that some Democrats and left-leaning Independents have reconsidered their allegiance to both. 

And yet, many of those people who say they have lost trust in these institutions are still accepting their characterizations of what Trump is doing. 

This phenomenon is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

The concept was coined by novelist Michael Crichton in a 2002 speech, naming it after Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with whom he had discussed the phenomenon.

Murray Gell-Mann recognized this bias in his own thinking. Every time he talked with a journalist about something, he was shocked at what they wrote. They clearly didn't have a clue about the subject and always got key points wrong. So he KNEW that journalists he dealt with were usually wrong, yet he continued to believe other things he read in the newspapers because he assumed that those journalists were somehow better. 

Everybody who deals with the media has seen this in action, and many "newsmakers" rely on the ignorance of reporters to spin them to get a false narrative out there. 

Obama advisor Ben Rhodes famously admitted as much in a New York Times Magazine piece in which he said:

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing."

There is ample evidence for all to see that the Pravda Media lie, that Democrats gleefully lie and brag about it (Nancy Pelosi bragged about smearing her opponents, and Harry Reid bragged that he lied about Romney and it worked), and yet millions of Americans are now up in arms about what these liars claim Trump is doing. 

They hear Trump is a fascist, so they worry that Trump is a fascist. They hear Trump is throwing people off Medicare, so they worry Trump will throw them off Medicare. They hear he is cutting Social Security, so they are outraged that he is. They believe Trump is deporting innocent Americans, planning to throw his opponents in jail, and will soon become Hitler reborn. 

All based on claims from people they already know will lie to them without remorse. 

It is bizarre and infuriating, yet even a Nobel Prize winner took years to recognize this tendency in himself. We are so indoctrinated into believing that the media is the "Fourth Estate," that Democrats are the "party of compassion," and that the establishment only wants what is good for ordinary Americans that a good chunk of the country still accepts those premises despite them being disproven time and again. 

You would think that the never-ending list of hoaxes pushed by the media would wake people up. The Steele Dossier? A bust, and one that the media, the FBI, the CIA, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign cooked up to discredit Trump. By now everybody should know that Hillary Clinton paid Perkins-Coie to cook it up--her campaign was fined for lying about doing so--yet Marc Elias is still respected, Hillary Clinton is an icon to many, James Comey is off selling books (and promoting the death of Trump), and the media folks who lied got Pulitzer Prizes. 

And so many people still believe them. 

Experience shows that it will take an "aha!" moment for each and every person to get them to wake up to the fact that the establishment has so much contempt for them that they will lie every time their lips move. We live in parallel realities; one in which the liars are the good guys and MAGA is a bunch of fascists, and one in which we scoff at everything the media says. 

It is a tragedy for the country, because we need a trustworthy media to hold people of both parties accountable and to inform us about the world. The Israel-Gaza war is a great example of how off track things can become when people just swallow the propaganda poured out by a media that literally employs Hamas operatives to write stories based on stories cooked up by the Gaza Health Ministry. 

What to believe? I doubt that Israel has made no mistakes in the war and don't assume I would support everything they are doing, but I am damn sure that nothing I read that makes Israel look bad is remotely true. Hamas operatives write the stories. The Associated Press officed alongside Hamas officials for years. The hospitals in Gaza are where many of the tunnel entrances are. The UNRWA partners with Hamas. The doctors criticizing Israel were holding hostages for Hamas. 

Yet the propaganda works, and it is due to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. People know the media lies, but believe them on any issue of which they are insufficiently educated.