They Stand Corrected

Getting the media to focus on truth is a long term effort. But it can be done. One of the most important steps is to raise a generation of young people committed to getting the two ingredients: facts plus context. In today’s episode, Josh talks with journalism students about this and fields questions about how to lead the battle for truth when people have such different paradigms for viewing the w...

A group of brave people create a “peace startup” to build connections — and the mainstream media ignores them. This is the story of Sharaka, a group that should make everyone feel hopeful this holiday season. Today, Josh speaks with the director of this group building friendships between Israelis and people in Arab nations who have only heard lies about Jews and Israel. Also, is there a new...

The media has been inundating you with alleged reasons for the election results. A lot of these reports conflict directly with each other, so it’s virtually impossible for news consumers to know which claims have any validity. Today, Josh shows you what’s factual and what’s just conjecture. For example, there’s no sign that voters focused on the economy or immigration gave Trump any kind of...

It took major news outlets just minutes to begin pushing claims about how various demographic groups voted in the election. They created a mess of conflicting reports, any of which could easily turn out to be false. Today, Josh digs into this problem. He explores very different claims about how Black Americans voted, and explains how news agencies are even ignoring their own warnings. Also, why a...

Josh has this brief, important message: Beware what you’re hearing about exit polls from the election. As people process the shock and trauma of an election loss, they look for explanations. The media jumps in to offer lots of explanations. That leads to conflicting reports and claims. For example, Josh shares three wildly different figures about how members of one demographic allegedly voted in t...

In this final episode before the election, a warning from Josh: Election Night coverage is largely designed to manipulate you. To take you on an emotional rollercoaster. He explains what you’d be better off doing during the first few hours, and why the early results sometimes suggest the opposite of what’s really happening. But first, a fiasco as the billionaire owners of the L.A. Times and Washin...

We’re in the final weeks of the presidential race, which means millions of Americans are being subjected to a barrage of political messaging. Within all that messaging lies a huge story that the media is missing: In recent years, our politics, media, and culture have been overtaken by false victim narratives.  Today, Josh explains how these come in very different forms on the right and far le...

It sounds like a farce. A hate monger writes a book in which he ignores the two central elements of truth: facts plus context. The media rolls out the red carpet for him, worshipping him. Finally one journalist challenges him — and that journalist gets in trouble with his own “news” network. This is a story of CBS, author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ false anti-Israel screed, pathetic news executives a...

This week, Josh was invited to give a keynote address at a ceremony marking one year since the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel, the most evil terrorist attack of modern times. In this episode, we’re bringing you his speech. Josh discusses the desperate need for people to learn the truth, which includes facts of that day and context of thousands of years of history. He explains the importance...

Hurricane Helene brought more of a dangerous tradition: “journalists” standing outside, getting blown and battered around. Are they gathering and providing crucial information? Actually, no. They’re not getting information that they couldn’t get safely from inside. You might think, if people are choosing to do this, what’s the harm? There is harm — not just in the immediate sense, but...

While the media fixates on one awful thing Trump and Vance are doing, it ignores lots of others. And that’s exactly how the Trump campaign wants it. Today, Josh explains the history of campaigns purposely fanning flames of controversy in the media so that their preferred issues dominate the news cycle. Meanwhile, will that same gullibility lead the media to fall for anti-Israel protests scheduled...

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are trying desperately to get the media to declare something — anything — involving Kamala Harris and Tim Walz a “scandal.” Today, Josh shows how transparent the effort is, with one of them even trying twice in a single televised interview. Will the media fall for it, as it did in 2016 with Hillary Clinton’s emails? Josh invites listeners to come up with an...

Media pundits heaped praise on the moderators of the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Why? Because amid Trump’s onslaught of lies, they offered a few brief moments of fact checking. Today, Josh explains that this proves the incredibly low bar for “journalism” at these spectacles — which are, as he has said before, “arson for truth.”...

When Tim Walz’s teenage son Gus teared up in pride over his father, right-wing talking heads bullied him. It brought a major issue into focus: battles over “masculinity.” The head of a top polling agency says it’s the only thing helping Trump keep the race close. Today, Josh shows that the media is caught between two superficial visions of masculinity, while ignoring reality. Through hard data, he...

The media should choose which stories to tell based on what’s most important and relevant. But often inside newsrooms, those decisions are instead based on how it will make the news agencies themselves look. That’s why in recent days, a huge story was, relatively speaking, buried. It involves both major parties, the presidential candidates, and a Trump move that should make the “ hypoc...

So much of the media has lost sight of what its role is in society: to provide truth. News organizations have even built operations around the opposite idea: letting anyone say anything. They’ve turned what should be journalism into open mic nights.  Recently, Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC called out the media, and his message spoke to this problem. Today, Josh shows sneakier ways the med...

When you look at many of the big problems in the world, you see that there are people working on solutions. That’s a major part of the positive side of the story of humanity. But in journalism, you generally wouldn’t know that. Most controversies are presented simply as two sides disagreeing. In fact there is now, pathetically, a term for the rare times that news organizations actually...

Perhaps the most frustrating kinds of lies in the media are the ones presented as part of a so-called “fact check.” In this episode, Josh digs into something that CNN got exactly wrong in discussing militaries in general, and Israel’s in particular. The network claimed that all military analysts except for one would agree on something false; Josh shows that even CNN’s own military analyst disputes...

From now until the election, expect an unprecedented onslaught of daily reports about political polls — many of them designed to manipulate you. Fear, dread, hopelessness, and anger get you to click and “doomscroll.”  Today, Josh explains why President Biden’s decision to drop out made sense, but the polls also don’t indicate what will happen in November. He shows how the Trump team wan...

When conspiracy theories grow, there’s a crucial step that news organizations should take. They should run those theories past the myth of invincibility. Today, Josh explains how that applies to coverage of many of the biggest news stories of our time, from the current presidential race to terrorist attacks and more. Plus, now that President Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, Jo...

When big news happens, media organizations clamor for your attention — even if they don’t have any new, concrete information to share with you. This breeds mistakes, hypocrisy, and more. In this episode, Josh explains what he’s watching out for in the coverage of the shooting at a Trump event, described by authorities as an attempted assassination.  Political violence operates against d...

It took only hours for the biggest political story to become a media story too, as news agencies rushed to cover the New York Times’ call for Biden to leave the race. In this episode, Josh explains that the media often treats the Times’ editorial board like the “great and powerful” Oz. In reality, it’s a group of 14 people with opinions. He explains that the media should contextualize this and sho...

There’s an irony and media failure at the core of the national freakout over the recent presidential debate. The media’s fixation on President Biden’s demeanor is so much bigger than the focus on former President Trump’s long list of lies. It raises a question at the heart of American democracy this July 4th: Do we value truth? In this episode, Josh dissects the media reactions and discusses...

A listener asks Josh to fact check media coverage of Republicans’ attacks against Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A. who successfully prosecuted Trump. It highlights a big issue: How the media’s lack of self-awareness severely damages our political scene. Today, how the media washes its hands of responsibility for creating a narrative. Also, why the media needs a “hypocrisy meter” so that it po...

From the way the mainstream media often describes it, you wouldn’t know Al Jazeera is a state-owned propaganda outlet of the Qatari government. And the problem isn’t just that the news organizations hide its identity. They go further, and praise it. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera praises and celebrates terrorists. On this episode of They Stand Corrected, Josh exposes the hypocrisy of news organ...