There are a lot of those lately, it seems, and they have a couple of things in common. The first is that they are a product of ignorance stemming from a lack of newsroom diversity. Anyone with any knowledge of guns, or the NRA, would have doubted the claim that firing pins were removed from people’s carry guns. But such familiarity is apparently unwelcome at The Times. Rolling Stone’s lurid gang-rape story read like bad fiction (which it was) but fed prejudices about fraternities and “white privilege” in a campus “rape culture.” And the notion that Reagan might endorse Clinton was believable only to people who didn’t know much about Reagan but had high hopes for Clinton.
The other thing these stories have in common is that they all served Democratic Party talking points, whether based on anti-gun thinking, “war on women” sloganeering, or pro-Hillary sentiment. For whom journalists are rooting, of course, is no mystery to most news media consumers, but it’s telling that the errors so often point in the same direction. (As columnist Kurt Schlichter tweeted, the corrections to news stories never seem to make conservatives look worse than the original.) That’s a diversity problem, too, of course: When everyone in the newsroom shares the same political leaning, groupthink and outright propagandizing get a lot easier.
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