[iconjack]

I watched the full debate. The proposition was "Don't Trust the Mainstream Media". On the pro side were Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray; the con side was made up of Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg.

It wasn't great. There were lots of personal attacks on both sides. Biting remarks can add spice to a debate, but this got a little ugly for my tastes. Gladwell went especially foul by intimating Taibbi's fondness for Walter Cronkite and other trusted journalists of his era was due not to these iconic newsmen's integrity, but because they were white men, a suggestion Gladwell made three or four times.

The Pro side brought up several of the big stories of the past few years on which the mainstream media went rather hard, but turned out to be widely accepted as wrong, like Trump-Putin collusion and Hunter Biden's laptop, but the Con team essentially dismissed these as nothingburgers.

Before the start of the debate, the audience is polled on their opinion about the proposition. It was 48% Pro (don't trust the media) and 52% Con. Another poll was taken at the end, and it was determined the Pro side (don't trust the mainstream media) won, with 67% now agreeing with them.

The most impressive person on the stage was the moderator Rudyard Griffiths. He struck me as an educated, composed, and immanently fair man.