John,

For generations, journalists have treated official government statements as a reliable starting point. That assumption made sense when public officials were constrained by truth, accountability, and consequences. It no longer does.

In recent weeks, federal agents have killed multiple civilians — and the Trump regime has responded by lying about what happened and smearing the victims. Too many news outlets continue to repeat those official accounts even when evidence shows they aren’t true.

In this piece, our contributor Mark Jacob argues that journalists must stop treating known liars as credible sources — especially when lives are at stake.

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News outlets have long conferred a high level of credibility to what government officials say. After all, they’re chosen through a democratic process, supposedly based on their competence and honesty.

In practice, of course, government officials sometimes lie and steal. And on a national level in the last decade, an entire political party has made it a matter of policy to lie brazenly to the public.

Now this party has made it a policy to cover up its own violence and even murder.

This is clear from what’s happened in Minneapolis in recent weeks, and what happened in the Chicago area before that and what happens in Homeland Security custody – 53 deaths since Donald Trump returned to power, including one this month ruled a homicide.

Early reports about Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were understandably vague and cautious (“Federal agent shoots and kills man in Minneapolis, officials say”). But the true test of the news media was how they handled the story as it evolved.

Soon after the story broke and the first bystander video appeared, I offered advice for the media on Bluesky: “HOMELAND SECURITY LIES ROUTINELY AS A MATTER OF POLICY. If you feel compelled to include the Trump regime’s version of events, you must include that context.”

That advice was generally ignored, of course, but the release of another video and the account put forth by Homeland Security made it clear that the government was determined to lie about the incident – as it had with the killing of Renee Good three weeks ago.

The second video of the Pretti shooting clearly showed him holding a cellphone as he attempted to help a woman pepper-sprayed by Border Patrol agents. The agents wrestled Pretti to the ground, and though he had a legally owned firearm, the video appears to show an agent taking it from him before any gunfire occurred. Then agents fired a total of 10 shots at Pretti, including three to his back, killing him.

Homeland Security’s version of the incident was that Pretti “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun” and that he intended to “massacre law enforcement.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and accused him of “domestic terrorism.”

Some timid news outlets kept their headlines generic for hours. An exception was the New York Times – which I have frequently criticized in the past but will praise here. The NYT moved with good speed to headlines such as “Man Killed by Federal Agents Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun” and “Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting.” It later dropped the hedging and said: “Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting.”

A day after the shooting, the NYT reported that the Trump regime was trying to ”justify an increasingly violent crackdown” by “immediately going on the offensive and demonizing the victim, often distorting the facts in the process.”

Homeland Security, as usual, is sticking to its lies. No investigation conducted by the regime will be credible. Already, the response of investigative agencies to Good’s murder has been so outrageous that federal officials have quit in protest.

The media’s overreliance on official accounts has long been a scandal. It has allowed law enforcement to get away with murder, literally. Journalists must stop relying on the accounts of officials they know are liars. Simple as that.

This puts the media in a tricky position: Do they believe eyewitnesses if they can find them? Do they believe advocacy groups? Attributing information to “officials” used to be a safe and easy position. Now journalists need to be more skeptical. Frankly, they should have been all along.

Video from smartphones and bodycams has made a huge difference in the public’s view of police-citizen encounters. But reliance on video has its hazards, too, in this age of AI fakery. News outlets must put adequate resources into verifying and analyzing such videos.

When I was an editor at the Chicago Tribune, we had a stark example of the dangers of trusting official accounts too much.

In 2014, a Black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald was carrying a knife and walking away from police when he was gunned down – shot 16 times – by a white officer who had arrived on the scene only seconds earlier. The first account on the Tribune’s website relied on the account of a police union spokesman, an obviously biased source, that the shooting was justified. Officers on the scene gave false statements and police brass swept the case under the rug.

A week after Mayor Rahm Emanuel won re-election, the city disclosed a $5 million settlement with McDonald’s family, triggering new media interest. For months, the Emanuel administration resisted the release of dashcam video of the killing, until an independent journalist won a court order to pry it loose. The belated disclosure led to the second-degree murder conviction of the officer, who served three years in prison. It never would have happened without the video.

Journalists at the Tribune and other Chicago media realized we had messed up by trusting the official account. We learned a painful lesson. Everyone covering the actions of Homeland Security – the real domestic terrorists – must learn that lesson too.

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