The most obvious explanation for why trust in media is at its lowest point in five decades is that much of what passes for news reporting these days is unreliable — sometimes intentionally so.

But there’s an equally credible, though less-discussed, theory for the trust gap: The news industry is rife with unlikeable creeps.

Take, for example, the smug, self-serving coverage of the deadly flooding in Central Texas over the July 4 weekend. Approximately 120 people across five counties have lost their lives. In better times, such a natural disaster would be met with a serious newsgathering effort and sober analysis.

Not so today. Instead, news of a deadly flood inspires a mountain of “told-you-sos” and partisan finger-pointing, as members of the press race each other to cast blame on their favorite political targets. Texas officials had not yet even begun to recover their dead before members of the press began to speculate that the Trump administration’s budget cuts and layoffs had exacerbated the death toll, their eagerness to link the deadly event with administrative reforms often accompanied by an outright admission that they had no idea if the two were connected.

On July 5, as efforts to recover bodies from flood waters began in earnest, CNN’s Juliette Kayyem said that one issue that must be addressed is “the question of what Donald Trump and the DOGE effort have done to the National Weather Service and [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. … [Did] those cuts mean that the team in place now maybe doesn’t have the experience, or there’s not enough of them?”

The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, whose forecasts cover Austin, San Antonio, and the surrounding areas, “had extra staff on duty during the storms,” as the Associated Press ultimately reported in the early morning hours of July 6. The National Weather Service also said its offices in Austin and San Antonio had “adequate staffing and resources” to issue warnings, which they did on July 3, before the flooding began, and again on July 4 as the flooding intensified. Yet these on-the-record remarks did nothing to cool media's zeal to tie the floods to the White House.

On July 6, ABC News........

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