WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — It is by now a commonplace to defend claims about the growth of “fake news” with the counter charge that people are seeking other sources of information because the mainstream media has lost credibility.

And in fact the establishment press provides examples every day of bias and willful ignorance to show why people no longer trust them.

Take, for example, a front-page story in the Washington Post this week decrying President-elect Donald Trump’s refusal to attend daily intelligence briefings.

The article — which portrayed this daily briefing under President Barack Obama as such an intense, high-level power meeting that staff scrambled to attend — was so grossly misleading that one of the Post’s own columnists wasted no time in puncturing its dishonesty.

Marc Thiessen pointed out that Obama skipped more than half his daily intelligence briefings in his first term, dropping to nearly 40% attendance early in his second term — a fact has been widely reported in alternate news sites for years.

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“If Obama had spent an hour a day with his intelligence briefers,” Thiessen trenchantly comments, “perhaps he would not have dismissed the Islamic State as the ‘JV squad’ in January 2014 and mistakenly declared that they were not ‘a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.’”

Thiessen’s point is that Trump and Obama both need a constant stream of intelligence from the national-security apparatus. Other commentators have pointed out that different presidents over the years have found different ways to absorb this intelligence, and Thiessen notes hopefully that Trump hinted he would take the briefings more seriously once he is in office.

None of this nuance was in the original Post news story, which instead mocked the incoming president by suggesting intelligence officials should dress up the briefing as a Fox News program so he would listen.

As egregious as this bias is, there is perhaps no area where the mainstream media fails in its duty to honestly inform more than in economics. Many reporters on economics know little about it except a smattering of catch phrases picked up in passing from the reigning neoliberal orthodoxy of free markets, free trade, balanced budgets and the overarching importance of “shareholder value.”

This is why an uninformed media has been so critical of suggestions by Trump that he would restrict unfair trade, run up the federal deficit, and make company executives think of something besides how to enrich themselves and their hedge-fund cronies.

One economic analyst became so furious at this parade of ignorance that he started shouting at his television.

The occasion was an interview on CNN with United Steelworkers official John Feltner by anchor Poppy Harlow. The union official express hope that Trump could keep jobs in America with trade policies while Harlow repeatedly countered that these jobs were being lost because of “automation and technology.”

“Please Poppy, come off it!” Labor Institute director Les Leopold wrote in exasperation. “Offshoring is about the rush to cheap labor, not about automation and new technology. The move to cheaper labor in Mexico, in fact, allows corporations to avoid investing in new technologies.”

Leopold cited the contrast with Germany, which has maintained manufacturing at 22% of the workforce, compared to 11% here, precisely by investing in advanced technologies and providing the training to workers to operate them. As a result, manufacturing workers make as much as 67% more in Germany than they do here, and manufacturing accounts for 21% of gross domestic product compared with 13% here.

U.S. companies have followed a different strategy. “Their CEOs grow wealthy by financially strip-mining their own companies,” Leopold said, “aided and abetted by elite financiers who have only one goal: extracting as much wealth as possible from the company while putting back as little as possible into production and workers.”

It is the pernicious concept of shareholder value that masks the real purpose of this charade, especially the widespread practice of stock buybacks. “This directly adds more wealth to the super-rich,” Leopold explained, “because stock buybacks inevitably increase the value of the shares owned by top executives and rich investors.”

In the long run, of course, this “is the path to annihilating the manufacturing sector,” Leopold maintains, citing a 2014 study in the Harvard Business Review. This harms not only the small buy-and-hold investor but also the other stakeholders in the company — the employees, the customers, the local community, and the country as a whole.

Leopold acknowledged that Harlow is not alone among mainstream-media reporters blindly repeating the trope about automation and technology as the reason for lost jobs in manufacturing. It is in the interests of the elites who own the media and profit from this ignorance.

So this Leopold’s conclusion is that he will stop yelling at his TV when Poppy Harlow starts covering stock buybacks.

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There are no doubt many bad players out there purveying genuinely “fake news” for dubious motives.

But the establishment press is way too eager to engage in a witch hunt mislabeling many alternative news sites on the left and the right — like AlterNet, which published the Leopold commentary — as “fake news” even though their greatest offense is to provide truths not available in a mainstream media riddled with bias and ignorance.