Three little words “We all make mistakes,” James Fallows begins his newsletter. “People, organizations, countries. The best we can do is admit and face them. And hope that by learning from where we erred, we’ll avoid greater damage in the future.” Yet half the country has internalized what Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn taught him: Never admit mistakes. Always attack your accuser. Win no matter what. Gloat when you do. “Roy was a master of situational immorality,” author Sam Roberts said. We view Donald Trump as the author of the Republicans’ descent into amorality. But often the slide is long before the edge of the cliff. Even while letting out a Wilhelm Scream, we will not admit to falling. Only losers admit mistakes. The powerful never do. It has become reflex. Fallows examines how news outlets have failed to arrest their slide into scandal mongering. The press has failed to confront past mistakes and thus failed to correct them. The relentless coverage of the “Red Wave” that never came, for example: Pundits and much of the mainstream press spent most of 2022 describing Joe Biden’s unpopularity and the Democrats’ impending midterm wipeout. As it happened, Biden and the party nationwide did remarkably well. On the morning after the election, conservative pundit Henry Olsen had an opinion column in the Washington Post headlined “I Was Wrong About the Midterms. Here’s What I Missed.” Olsen writes in the opinion section. Seven weeks after the election the New York Times ran a story on how predictions went…