White House Launches “Media Bias Offender Tipline”

Plus, anti-Israel student posted Summers Harvard classroom video

Program note: Tomorrow (Friday December 5) at about 1 p.m. eastern time we’re planning to be going “Live” with Jonathan Mahler, author of “The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990,” and with Douglas Century, author of “Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II.” To tune in it’ll help to have the Substack mobile app installed. If you can’t catch it on short notice, don’t stress—I’m hoping to post a recording of it later—but it should be fun, so if you can join us, we’d love to have you. There should be an alert when it starts with info on how to join.

A Gallup poll shows the decline in trust in mass media.

The Trump White House has launched a “media bias offender tipline” offering ordinary Americans the opportunity to “help expose the worst of the worst” by proposing skewed news items and the journalists responsible for inclusion in an “offender hall of shame.”

The White House website has a new section at https://www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias/ listing a “media offender of the week,” and a database of reporters, publications, and categories such as “lie,” “misrepresentation,” “bias,” “omission of context,” and “left-wing lunacy.” A leaderboard tracks publications with the most offenses, and a “repeat offenders” graphic lists those outlets that “don’t just get it wrong – they do it over and over again.”

As a longstanding press critic, I appreciate the spirit of this. Pushing back on a public website against inaccurate or tilted coverage is a less heavyhanded approach than another tactic President Trump has floated, canceling the broadcast licenses of networks whose correspondents ask him or his guests impertinent questions. It certainly beats the Chinese approach of throwing the journalists in jail (as they did with Jimmy Lai), or the Saudi approach of killing the journalists (as they did with Turki Al-Jasser and Jamal Kashoggi.)

As far as the usefulness of the White House database as a guide for consumers—the way that third-party reviews and ratings might help a prospective buyer choose a hotel or a washing machine or a restaurant—the main takeaway so far seems to be that almost every outlet is skewed. The graphic of “repeat offenders” already includes CBS News (notwithstanding that Bari Weiss and David Ellison are now in charge over there), ABC News, NBC News, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. In a sense the White House is confirming what survey data indicate Americans are already sensible enough to understand. Gallup, which has been measuring trust in news media in polls for more than half a century, in October 2025 released a poll showing that “Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.” The Pew Research Center, which has been asking similar questions since 2016, also released October 2025 data indicating a decline: “Overall, 56% of U.S. adults now say they have a lot of or some trust in the information they get from national news organizations – down 11 percentage points since March 2025 and 20 points since we first asked this question in 2016.”

That tracks with declining trust in a wide range of institutions (with the exception of the police, where surveys show rising trust). It poses some risks for the health of a democracy. The First Amendment has helped to protect the press’s ability to serve as a watchdog against corruption, malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, waste, fraud, abuse, overreach, and other injustices. Yet without earned trust, the press’s ability to perform that function is eroded. If no one believes the watchdog when it barks, it’s not a particularly functional watchdog. The best cure is probably a press that views criticism not as an attack to be defended against from a defensive crouch, but as part of the back-and-forth and free exchange of ideas that clarifies facts, informs the public, and leads closer to the truth. In a healthy free market, the ordinary workings of competition perform a lot of these functions without a lot of government intervention. We are doing our best to participate in that market here.