Stephanie Ruhle Doesn't Know There's Fact-Checking on X

Live by your own rule, Ruhle!

One of my biggest pet peeves is when media figures make hyperbolic claims about the spread of misinformation online and suggest that journalists, misinfo watchdogs, and fact-checkers—i.e., the professional class to which the media figure belongs—should be more involved in shaping social media moderation policies. When this subject is broached, what often happens is that the media figure then goes on to say something that is itself false, which raises an obvious question: Why would we give such professionals power to police false information when they have proven just as susceptible to it?

MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle provided an almost perfect illustration of this phenomenon during an interview with The Office's Rainn Wilson on his podcast. Wilson asked Ruhle why so many people distrust the mainstream media, and she responded thus:

NEW: 'The Office' star Rainn Wilson claps back after MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle claims Elon Musk and Donald Trump are responsible for the public distrust of the mainstream media.

Wilson: "40% of Americans don't trust mainstream media. Why is that? How did we get here?"

Ruhle:… pic.twitter.com/v7ohnXBzxl

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2025

Ruhle made several reasonable points: The crisis in mainstream media has coincided with a general collapse of all sorts of institutions; media critics have exploited major journalistic blunders that eroded confidence in name-brand journalistic outlets; Republicans and President Donald Trump in particular have cast the media as the enemy and are, at all times, running against the mainstream press.

But when it came to social media, she said the following: "You have the Elon Musk media machine, because they want you to leave traditional media and they want you to go to X, which is a bastion of misinformation, where there is no fact-checking. So it's a perfect storm of people saying 'I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm tuning out, I'm disconnecting,' and you have a force pushing it."

Emphasis mine, because that claim is simply false. It's misinformation!

X does have fact-checking of a kind, in that anyone is free to write their own X post that calls out or corrects what they have seen. X also has Community Notes, a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced fact-checking system that has been received favorably by even The New York Times. When sensational and abjectly false content goes viral on X, it is often accompanied by a Community Note that corrects the post and links to a credible source.

When Ruhle says there is no fact-checking on X, her actual grievance is that there is no fact-checker-derived censorship—i.e., content is not removed from the site at the behest of fact-checkers. That's the system that Facebook favored for years, though Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that it had resulted in the suppression of legitimate opinions.

Ruhle has the right to be wrong; I'm not advocating this episode of Wilson's podcast be suppressed simply because she made a false claim. But isn't that the system she wants? I don't make the rules, Ruhle!

This Week on Free Media

I am joined by Amber Duke to discuss Joe Rogan's warning about due process, Pete Hegseth's woes, changes to the federal government's COVID-19 website, and James Carville's thoughts on David Hogg.

 

Worth Watching

I had no idea that Max's Hacks had returned for its fourth season*—thank you, Mom, for informing me. This really is one of my favorite shows at the moment, and I highly recommend it.

*CORRECTION: This article previously misstated which season of Hacks had recently been released.

Comments

[MyPublicName]

MSNBC host spreading misinformation about misinformation is not the least bit surprising to me. Good article.

[Heraclitus]

"of a kind".

Soave wastes our time with gotcha journalism thinking he caught Ruhle in a gotcha to yank it back with "of a kind". So what's your point Soave? Am I now Reason's fact checker because the comment section exists?

If you disable the comment section and I post something on X to the effect that "Soave is misleading" does that mean I am fact-checking Soave?

If I then get sent to CECOT and I am lucky enough to slip a note to a visiting Senator have I now fact-checked Soave?

[Use the Schwartz]

I can't wait 'til she finds out about Reddit or The Chans.

[Marshal]

When Ruhle says there is no fact-checking on X, her actual grievance is that there is no fact-checker-derived censorship—i.e., content is not removed from the site at the behest of fact-checkers.

I think there is something even more important she wants. The fact checker needs to be credentialed which in modern media means in good standing with the far left and thus willing to define misinformation according to her own political preferences.

[Zeb]

The community notes is probably the best fact checking functionality I've seen on any social media. People like Ruhle just want control.

[Mickey Rat]

Did the mainstream news organizations make "journalistic blunders" or were they caught trying to deliberately manipulate public opinion with dishonest reporting? Is Ruhle upset about misinformation on X or that X is out of the media's control and will be a watchdog over misinformation from the mainstream media.

[DRM]

Let's assume the mainstream media is trustworthy.

Then, a priori, how many cases of famous, known, deliberate, front-page lies should be attributable to the #1 Google search result for "highest-prestige newspaper in the United States"?

I mean, if the mainstream media is basically trustworthy, shouldn't one famous, known, deliberate front-page lie be enough to end such prestige, in favor of a paper that doesn't have such a blemish on its record?

Or phrased the other way, can it really be called trustworthy if there are multiple such blemishes recorded for the most prestigious newspaper in the country?

Because, when I do that search result, the results name a paper that I know that told us in the 1930s that Stalin was not murdering Ukrainians and purging the innocent in show trials. That, in the 1960s, perpetrated the Kitty Genovese hoax. That, in the 1990s, invented out of thin air the claim that George Bush (41) was amazed by a grocery scanner.

It did not put any of these lies on its front page in error, because it was deceived by a rogue reporter, or because it was tricked by a source. Each of those times the story was run under circumstances where we can be certain that the senior-most news editors either knew the stories were false, or were willfully ignorant of that fact. And in each case, when informed of its error, it refused to retract the story, standing behind the reporting for literal decades each time.

If that's how the most prestigious newspaper in the US acts, well, what can you expect from #2? #10? #50?

So the problem isn't that the "mainstream media" isn't trusted anymore. The problem is that they were ever trusted.

There is an old saying about trusting sources in the newspaper business -- "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Someone who approaches the mainstream media with any more trust than that is an idiot.