‘Resolved: Don’t Trust Mainstream Media’

Recently in Toronto the ongoing and often worthwhile Munk Debates turned their attention to the mainstream media and why people no longer trust it. Arguing the affirmative were Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi, the latter currently airing internal Twitter communications mined from the social media plaform’s pre-Musk email archive.

Those revelations — censorship at the behest of Democrats, banning right-leaning tweeters but none on the left, ruthlessly deep-sixing the Hunter Biden story — are jaw-dropping in their brazenness yet have gone rigorously unreported by establishment media organs. If further proof were needed that the mainstream can’t and shouldn’t be trusted the treatment of those three stories alone constitutes an iron-tight case for the prosecution.

On the other side, the New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times opinionista Michelle Goldberg. Listeners who have enjoyed some of Gladwell’s early books, The Tipping Point, for example, may find their admiration considerably diminished by his red herrings, evasions and bitchy obfuscations.

Video of the encounter is supposedly available only to the Munk Foundation’s financial supporters, but someone has nevertheless posted the full debate on YouTube (below). Should that bootlegged clip be taken down,  the audio — this link goes straight to the embedded file — can be heard free of charge.

As in all Munk debates, the audience was polled before the event, with a 54-48 majority saying their trust in the mainstream media is not misplaced. Polled again at evening’s end, the division was 67-33 in favour of Murray and Taibbi. — roger franklin