At a conference recently I defended the mainstream media. And who wouldn’t, really? But I was speaking on the closing panel at FreedomFest (or as my partner put it, I played the big room in Vegas), which is often called a libertarian conference but had plenty of Trumpists this July. So I wasn’t just preaching to the choir. Above, video of my three-minute filibuster. 

On the panel, Steve Forbes said that “the so-called mainstream media is becoming less and less relevant” thanks to new technology and social media, and that they are “ideological frauds” and “totalitarian frauds.” I disagreed with him. I noted first that I do think the mainstream media such as NPR fail to adequately examine the most important fact in modern history—what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Fact, the enormous and continuing increase in human longevity and living standards since the industrial revolution. But I went on to say that the mainstream media are our main source of news about the world. And for all the talk about the rise of conservative media, very few conservative media have reporters on the ground around the country and the world. The major media have “real reporters on the ground all over the world,…and a lot of what the right-wing media does is take potshots at those reporters and their reports, and that’s fine, that’s part of the checking process.” But we should remember that the mainstream media “also serve as a check on overbearing, abusive government in the United States and other places in the world.” 

And that’s why, I said, “it’s really discouraging to me to see a president of the United States constantly denouncing the independent media and the independent judiciary as enemies of the American people, as purveyors of fake news.”

I’ve criticized, here and elsewhere, plenty of examples of what I see as media bias. But I am in sympathy with Thomas Jefferson when he wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. ”

The whole FreedomFest panel video is not online but can be purchased.