A good point here, one made many times by other righty commentators. Everyone has their own list of examples, although the most glaring in recent memory is Twitter blacking out the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election.

My concern is that both sides have essentially now adopted the view that “since their media sucks, it’s okay if ours sucks too.”

Why should Fox go the extra mile to try to get to the truth when big media ran with the Steele dossier for months, right? Watch, then read on.

"What I have found interesting working in what I consider liberal media is not the stories that we talk about, but the stories that we don't talk about."

WATCH: Meghan McCain went off on The View while discussing "fairness in the media" on Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/abftwqEd2t

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) April 28, 2021

“The View” landed on this topic because no fewer than three stories that went viral in righty media recently have gone bust on further review. The most spectacular example was the New York Post’s scoop about Kamala Harris’s children’s book supposedly being handed out to unaccompanied migrant minors in HHS shelters. That one turned out to be so far off base that the Post reporter who wrote it resigned afterward:

An announcement: Today I handed in my resignation to my editors at the New York Post.

— Laura Italiano (@Italiano_Laura) April 27, 2021

It's been a privilege to cover the City of New York for its liveliest, wittiest tabloid — a paper filled with reporters and editors I admire deeply and hold as friends. I'm sad to leave.

— Laura Italiano (@Italiano_Laura) April 27, 2021

Italiano stressed later that she wasn’t claiming that her editors knew the story was false when they “ordered” her to write it, but evidently she had an inkling that it was overblown at some point before it went to press and it ended up in the paper anyway. The truth, apparently, is that *one copy* of Harris’s book was donated to an HHS shelter by a local resident. Whether that copy even made it into the hands of a migrant kid is unclear; it did, however, make it into a Reuters photograph that accompanied Italiano’s story. We’re left to wonder how the Post story came about. Did some editor see the photo, assume that Harris’s book was being doled out at taxpayer expense, and assign Italiano to investigate?

How did that investigation end up with a false scoop about copies being given to migrant kids?

Two other stories broke big recently in righty media and then fizzled out. One was the claim that John Kerry had tipped off Iran’s foreign minister to a closely guarded secret, that Israel’s military had covertly struck some 200 Iranian targets in Syria. But Israel itself seems to have publicly acknowledged that fact several years ago: “IDF says it has bombed over 200 Iranian targets in Syria since 2017,” a Times of Israel story noted in September 2018. Then there was the “Biden wants to limit Americans to four pounds of red meat per year” scoop which went haywire among big-name populists on social media and turned out to be based on a Daily Mail news article, not a White House proposal. (Although progressives do want to limit beef consumption to slow climate change.)

All of those can be dismissed as curios, one-day sensations that don’t do anything to move the political needle meaningfully the way the Steele dossier did, for instance. But populist media did have a truly consequential miss within the past few months, and the fallout is being felt even now.

The only way for either side to improve is if the media watchdogs in their own tent respond aggressively to their errors, not just those of the other side, but that’s not going to happen. The loudest complainers about media bias reliably go deaf to errors made by ideological allies, and that includes complainers within big media of course. Witness how many MSM industry-policers are quick to flag Fox every day for its excesses but were mostly quiet when “60 Minutes” ran a ridiculous hit piece on Ron DeSantis. It’s partisan warfare all the way down, not honest watchdogging, and there’s no reason to think it’ll get better rather than worse.

I’ll leave you with Juan Williams calling out some of righty media’s mistakes on the air yesterday. It’s to Fox’s credit that they gave him their platform to make that point.

Juan Williams seems to call out his own network: "Last week we had the hamburger story, 'Oh, Biden is going to take your hamburger!' Or it's…Kamala Harris’ book is being given to immigrants. These stories are false, but the right-wing echo chamber starts going crazy!" pic.twitter.com/utFHUJCeVz

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021