Accountability Is Not Dead—It’s Just Selective

When the rules only apply to some people, they aren’t rules anymore. They’re preferences.

One of the most common complaints about modern public life is the disappearance of accountability. Politicians are not accountable. The media is not accountable. Corporations are not accountable. Institutions that once claimed moral authority now seem able to operate without consequences.

The phrase “no one is ever held accountable anymore” has become almost a cliché.

We recently watched this play out in real time. Following an ISIS-inspired attempted bombing in New York, law enforcement reported that explosives had been thrown toward anti-Islam protesters during a confrontation near the mayor’s residence. Yet many “news” outlets quickly produced headlines and articles that gave the impression that there wasn’t really a terrorist attack at all—or that, if there was, it was somehow the fault of right-wing protesters.

At CNN, host Abby Phillip inaccurately described the attack as being directed at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Phillip later acknowledged the mistake and issued a correction on air, saying she had incorrectly described the target and apologized for the error. In other words, she eventually did the minimum professional standards require—she corrected the record.

But the story did not end there. Later, on Phillip’s own show, CNN commentator Ana Navarro repeated the same inaccurate claim even after another panelist noted that the attack had actually been directed at protesters. Navarro did not issue a correction, and the conversation moved on without challenge—even though Phillip herself had already acknowledged the mistake.

That small moment illustrates something important. Accountability, at its most basic level, is personal. When people make public claims, they should be willing to be checked and, when proven wrong, correct the record. They should also care enough about their own credibility to do enough homework beforehand to ensure the statements they make—and the actions they take—are grounded in fact—and when somebody on your show affirmatively states a falsehood, you call it out.

This kind of self-regulating accountability used to be common in professions that depended heavily on credibility. A reporter who discovered an error would move quickly to correct it because reputation mattered. A scholar would retract a flawed claim because intellectual honesty mattered. The system worked largely because individuals understood that their own integrity was on the line.

Today that kind of personal accountability appears to be increasingly rare. In a polarized media environment where tribal loyalty and online attention often outweigh reputational concerns, the incentive structure has shifted. Correcting a mistake can feel like conceding ground to the other side, so the temptation becomes to defend the narrative rather than examine the facts.

The deeper issue is that accountability itself is not a self-generating force. It does not appear simply because people invoke the word. Accountability is a dependent concept. It exists only when certain conditions are present, and when those conditions disappear, accountability disappears with them.

At its core, accountability is binary. Either someone is held accountable for what they say and do, or they are not. A claim is either corrected or it is allowed to stand. A violation of standards either produces consequences or it does not. What people often confuse with accountability is the machinery surrounding it—the institutions, rules, and cultural expectations that determine whether accountability will be enforced.

For accountability to exist at all, the first requirement is the presence of standards. Every functioning institution depends on rules that define acceptable behavior. In journalism, for example, those standards traditionally include accuracy, verification of facts, corrections when errors occur, and some separation between reporting and advocacy. Without standards, accountability becomes impossible because there is nothing against which behavior can be measured.

But simply having standards written down somewhere is not enough. Those standards must also be rigid. A rule that is endlessly flexible or selectively interpreted stops functioning as a rule at all. It becomes a suggestion, something that can be ignored whenever it becomes inconvenient. Once that happens, accountability begins to erode because the standards themselves no longer constrain behavior. People instinctively understand that rules applied selectively are not really rules; they are preferences.

In the end, the disappearance of accountability is rarely mysterious. It happens whenever one of its supporting pillars is removed. Without standards, there is nothing to enforce. Without rigid standards, rules become meaningless. Without the willingness of institutions to enforce those standards, violations go unpunished. And without individuals willing to correct their own errors, the entire system begins to drift.

Accountability is not magic. It is a structure and like any structure, it only stands when its supports remain intact. Remove the standards, soften them until they mean nothing, abandon the will to enforce them, or lose the habit of personal honesty—and the entire framework collapses.

When people say accountability has disappeared, what they are really noticing is that one or more of those pillars has quietly been taken away.