It's time to vote in the 2025 Media Fail Awards

The biggest ways legacy media blew it in holding the Trump administration accountable

What were the biggest, most disastrous media failures of this year? There are far too many to choose from.

At They Stand Corrected, my podcast and newsletter fact checking the news, I focus on the two biggest kinds of media failures: times in which the media allows people to lie uncorrected (which I call the “open mic night” phenomenon) and times in which the media itself “reports” lies. Readers and listeners send me examples. My inbox is always inundated.

Here at The Contrarian, I’ve shared some of the biggest ways in which the legacy media have helped the Trump administration spew falsehoods to the masses. In looking back at this year, I see that the examples that got people most fired up fall into four big topics. So for the second annual “Media Fail Awards” (I wrote about the first such “awards” last year here), I focused a category around them. These are all topics that The Contrarian’s audience responded to in 2025—a powerful reminder that new media is necessary in order to hold Big Media accountable.

Starting today, you can vote for the worst of the worst. The shortcut is mediafailawards.com.

Nominee 1: Immigration

From fentanyl to sex trafficking to the National Guard shooting, President Donald Trump and his team never miss a chance to blame awful things on illegal immigrants. And the media lets them.

In live interviews on the TV networks’ Sunday political talk shows, hosts sit there while Trump and his surrogates spout disproven lies. And in written reports, big news agencies like CNN, ABC and the BBC publish Trump’s quotes without any fact checking. So it’s no wonder that some people who get news from big mainstream outlets continue to support Trump’s extreme actions to crack down on immigration.

Nominee 2: The federal workforce

One of Trump’s most dangerous and impactful actions of the past year has been destroying entire swaths of the federal government—including vital, life-saving roles, like in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But if you watched, listened to, or read certain news interviews, you might think he’s just seeking “efficiency.”

Case in point: On NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, claimed that in four weeks, “We’ve already identified over 55 billion dollars of waste and fraud.” He also said Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin had “admitted on MSNBC” that protests over the cuts were being manufactured. All this was false. He was not corrected.

Nominee 3: The economy

Concerns about the economy were the biggest driving force in the 2024 election. Relatedly, Americans are also very concerned about the national debt, which has soared past $38 trillion. But the media continues to bury a basic reality that all Americans should know: Republican administrations routinely outspend Democratic ones.

Legacy media talk about GOP “deficit hawks” and “fiscal hawks,” even though virtually all end up voting for massive spending bills as long as they come from a Republican president. The more the media does this, the more Americans get the false idea that the GOP is more likely to tackle the debt’s rising annual cost to taxpayers.

Nominee 4: Abandoning Ukraine

This one might feel further from home. But some people believe Trump’s pro-Russia stance and abandonment of Ukraine mark a historic, dangerous turn away from democracy on a global scale. “By definitively abandoning America’s self-appointed historic mission, the second Trump administration has deprived the world of its leading arsenal of democracy, forcing defenders of freedom to regroup and rethink their strategies,” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says.

But when CBS News got an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the show did not bring up democracy once. It didn’t even use the word. Even more surprisingly, the network took guidance from the Russian government in how to conduct the interview—a move so obviously anti-journalistic that it surprised even me.

Ready to say which is worst? Vote here.

I’m well aware that there are plenty of other choices for nominees in this category. So I invite you to vote and add other big topics in the comments!

Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.

---