"The cases of misreported or erroneously reported major news stories begin to make you wonder, "Are the news media just out there to get Trump," says W. Joseph Campbell, communications professor at American University and the author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. "The relationship with the president is very tense and is very strained and very stretched, and probably more stretched than strained than it has been in the recent past."

Campbell also runs Media Myth Alert, a blog that tracks the recycling of fake news stories in the mainstream media. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie about the state of legacy media, the relationship between the press and the president, and the need for media literacy, Cambpell talks about journalists' penchant for overstating their significance and how they often leads them to run with bad information.

"Media power tends to be overstated, it tends to be episodic," says Campbell, who has debunked the role of Walter Cronkite in "ending" the Vietnam War and the Washington Post in bringing down Watergate. "But most of the times, the media are not as powerful as we like to give them credit for or we tend to give them credit for."

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