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.
The post Stephanie Ruhle Doesn't Know There's Fact-Checking on X appeared first on Reason.com.
