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Comment by therpe1 | Hacker News Reader

Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere.

And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well-sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-medi...

[2] http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...

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I strongly disagree. While Democratic Party loyalists and the establishment center-left may trust the mainstream media, in general progressives and leftists don't. They're not going to InfoWars, of course; they're going to The Intercept, CounterPunch, Jacobin, Truthout, etc.

Trust in the media is also extremely low among those voting for independents, and only half decent among Democrats:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...

If 51% trust in the media is seen as 'good' for the left wing, then standards have really fallen.

If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).)

And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right.

My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery.

[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/do...

Apologies if I'm out of order but is there a particular reason why therpe1's posts are being marked [dead]? [dead] posts are difficult to read )in my browser at least).

To counter your assertion that it's just "the right wing" who have lost trust in the MSM, I would direct your attention towards: https://www.off-guardian.org

Left-Center here. Appalled at the media bias. You must not be looking.

Out of curiosity: Which way do you see the media being biased?

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