Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. Most boring, non-sensational broadcast there is and yet, they fill it up with sold content and reporting. Also, no advertising.
The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it.
It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.
The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
>Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial.
and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...
> I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:
That was added later, hence the italics.
As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys.
The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become.
I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-...
NYT has also published pieces about my country that I'd hardly could classify as any other thing than undisguised activism.
So I remain very skeptical. It seems to me that there's a wave of new journalism culture in all the west that it's not being challenged from the inside.
Here in Spain journalist make their ocassional reunions, interviews and stuff and they moan of the low consideration people have about them, then they go back to their seats to write or record what is basically political activism.
What I'm saying is that papers like the NYT were at least trying to separate facts from opinions in their reporting. It's just painful to see such a healthy tradition become overshadowed by the political trend du jour.
Journalists have to write about everything, and they arent experts at anything. My hypothesis is thqt the lazyiest of em just become activists and make this a way of life.
If you have any doubt about this, write any of the most common names in major publications in google and try find their twitter.
Having good information is very difficult, and it typically involves paying for it, or accessing specialist publications, or niche ones.
It is one of those unconfortable truths.
I think to those on the right the last few years really opened their eyes to how much bias there is in journalism. I wish more people on the left noticed it as well, though I’m sure some did.
Either way, I’m surprised nobody has taken the opportunity to start a news source that actually attempts to be objective. Maybe it’s impossible, or maybe people just don’t want it…but I do.
Sorry but …you're gonna to have to back that up with pointer to some kind of records of this event .
RCP prints outrageous stories from both sides of the aisle. They don't try to find the center, they give you both sides.
The reckoning was indeed severe, but it was deserved.
Also completely agree that the "both sides" coverage did not work as intended.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...
that’s ambiguously overstated. perhaps 1% of nyt journalism is “world-class”, meaning well-researched, investigative, and impactful. 99% is of the “moralistic crusade” kind of journalism, trying to influence the popular sentiment, rather than reporting on it.
and while 2016 was an inflection point, it’s certainly been on a longer slide, observable during the 2008 financial crisis and somewhat before that.
Cheerleading the Iraq War did it, for me. Especially for the NYT, but media generally. I sincerely wish them all the worst.
Then again, journalists as stock characters in fiction have been morally grey at best for just about all of the 20th century, at least, and I think to a substantial degree before that, too. I'm not sure where the idea that journalists have typically been, or been regarded as, forthright and virtuous, in the past, came from. The whole thing seems like a fiction built on a very few examples from a narrow time period (Cronkite's usually cited, for example)
Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.
News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.
Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…
I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...
Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines.
This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.
Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.
The media in America is 100% dependent on Gell-Mann Amnesia (https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) and some have pushed it so far that it's starting to wear off.
Hatred for CNN and other mainstream news is fed to a huge swath of the population by conservative politicians and pundits. They also heap scorn on excellent news sources like the NY Times and Washington Post because their factual reporting is damaging to their dishonest campaigns. Meanwhile, conservative media has shed any semblance of civility and just run blatantly agenda-driven stories. There's no both sides to this. It's almost entirely due to conservatives.
I can guarantee you that you don't just happen to hold the "right" viewpoints across all areas, removing the need to ever be exposed to other ideas. (And no, having CNN set up caricatures of other's ideas to make a mockery of them is not being exposed to other viewpoints). The idea that you're so right and everyone else is so dumb/wrong/evil/etc. that they're not allowed a voice, is really not a good position to hold.
That's not actually remotely true. People Are Subjective, and "real news" is written by people, and often about people. For one example, they gave Sanders less coverage than Clinton in every single week of the Dem primary; about 2/3 overall.
Their visuals, style, tone and presentation are meticulously crafted to give the impression that they're trustworthy and patriotic; that things are simple. That really ought to give you a clue that they're selling you something.
Tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies
I'm not comparing them a mythical platonic ideal media organization. I'm comparing them to outlets that are willing to push blatant falsehoods like birtherism or vaccine denial while giving "equal time" to climate deniers or the Laffer Curve economists. Fox was run for decades by a guy who loved conspiracy theories and was not bothered by colluding with politicians on one side and not the other. OAN and Newsmax are worse.
And on top of that a lot the hatred towards CNN is based purely on politically motivated lies. Trump hated them and told his supporters to hate them for spurious reasons. He would accuse them of lying about "the Russia thing" without citing an actual bad report as a way to distract from the factual reporting that made him look bad. Spreading mistrust of the media was part of his playbook to control what people believe and it worked extremely well.
Search CNN.com for Donziger and see how many results you get. I'll save you the effort; it's ZERO.
Here's a CNN page full of facts on the kids in border camps - https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/04/politics/biden-a...
People will read that, and think to themselves, oh what an even handed tone. What a large number of facts, and nice graphic breakdowns. But the crucial context is missing - who is running those camps, and what are their contracts like? Those people are making money hand over fist, on the back of the misery of children in tin-foil blankets drinking water out of toilets.
Same with their "fast facts" section on Assange - an exercise in misinformation. The information might be "factual", but it's carefully selected to give a particular impression. Crucial information isn't there, such as the US' key witness admitting he gave false evidence, or Nils Melzer's observations.
Yes, a search for Nils Melzer yields TWO articles - compare to a search for 'Kardashian', which yields 1,700 hits. There are more stories about the Kardashian's shoe line than the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
A search for 'Chomsky' yields 7 result; none seem to be about him or his observations. Yes, SEVEN, the single digit number. 'Zizek' yields ONE (and 'Žižek 'yields zero).
'Snooki' yields 116.
That's not News bud; not any more than Fox. That's entertainment. If you want to learn about a fire in California there are hundreds of ways to do it, and they're probably mostly better than CNN.
... Wow. Well, enjoy following the news CNN choose to tell you, I guess. Those Kardashian shoe lines are much more news than anything Chomsky has to say for some people, and I guess you're one of them. lol
I just started watching this over the past year, not every day, but when something interesting happens and I want a mindless way to follow developments.
PBS broadcasts and uploads to various places, which makes consumption so much easier than others that are seeking profits. Between NewsHour, FrontLine, and their local broadcasts, PBS has done a great job compared to other media outlets.
That has nothing to do with click bait and more to do with keeping loyal user base inflamed and plugged in. That’s why NYT doesn’t even bother how 50% of the country would feel when they blatantly call the worst pandemic in century “red COVID”. Or when Fox News cheers at the sitting presidents inability to answer a question without completely losing the thread as if it is a win for the side they are in. Real loser is the American people as always.
I too like PBS NewsHour and modeled https://legiblenews.com/ off the idea of being non-sensational with no ads.
Another thing I did that this crowd would appreciate: I made sure that each page would have one and only one web request. Check it out in your network activity area in your browser—its fast!
See https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...
But, they provide very timely news on "market-moving" information (i.e. news that are/will be breaking news), often faster than mainstream media. So that is a very valuable service (for me).
It's a nice quote to pull out of context though.
This is a common talking point of the advocacy crowd. The problem is that, as used, it's a non-sequitur.
Sure, human beings have inherent bias. The answer to that is, and always has been, to strive for objectivity as best we can even though we are flawed. The advocacy crowd instead takes it as an excuse to throw objectivity out entirely and double down on their own bias.
"the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as the national public broadcaster"
Further:
Minister Responsible: Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Heritage, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...
"Prior to her academic work, Candis produced, wrote, and reported for television, the Internet, and radio in Canada (CBC, CTV)"
Source: https://jwam.ubc.ca/profile/candis-callison/
Also from the same article:
"However, Candis Callison calls objectivity "the view from nowhere" and considers it potentially harmful. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and Canada for television, the internet and radio, including at the CBC."
"There's a limit to how much you can put yourself in, but when you begin to think in terms of your place in society, what your relative privilege is, what social orders have benefited you and where they have not benefited you, I think this is where you're thinking about a news story. [It] shouldn't just be about a news story as an event, but how it's an intersection of systems and structures."
To me, this isn't what the news is about. This is option and interpretation. News should report facts, not try to apply social theory to interpret them for me. I'm not quote mining like you suggest. The context of the article does not make it any better. Further:
"It's been a very interesting few weeks on social media. And especially on Twitter, where you have Indigenous journalists and Black journalists talking about what's happened to them in the newsroom. Those kinds of narratives really illustrate the ways in which journalism is absolutely a work of interpretation, and recognizing journalism as contributing to a social order is a first step in seeing it as a tool that might do good in the world."
This is even more alarming. They're essentially saying the news is by its nature an interpretation of events and can't be otherwise. This is false. There are plenty of news sources which report short, concise segments of information without interpretation (ie: Reuters).
It's a real shame, given that the CBC used to be quite a respectable organization, and would work hard to represent perspectives from all over Canada (given the constraints of the time).
I'm ostensibly in the group they're pandering to, but I just can't tolerate the obvious agenda setting. I can't imagine what the more conservative Canadians must think about it. Rex Murphy (a former CBC reporter) doesn't have much good to say about his old organization.
If you think the CBC is "far left," then you don't actually know what "far left" really is. CBC is, at most, left of center. I'm open to having my mind changed if you can provide, for example, an instance of the CBC advocating workers seizing the means of production.
They don't produce the segment, but they give it air time which does imply some agreement with the content. I disagree that they're center-left, or far-left, but they definitely ride the outermost left boundary of the Overton Window, and sometimes spill a little over.
If someone quits because their workplace is sexist, perhaps the motivation in going public is to warn people. You framing this as not being anything but virtue signaling (without using the actual phrase) and use it as an indisputable fact to back your point up strikes me as being the same sort of thing that people on the right claim the media engages in.
Can you point to where I said this was an indisputable fact? If you can't, then that's likely because I said the opposite, which you can see in the line you yourself quoted me on:
"which is arguably a career limiting move dressed up as virtuous political posturing."
Basically, all this says is that "I think publicly denouncing your employer for political, social, or other reasons might not make you look good in future job applications", and that someone telling you to do so on a highly political podcast might be motivated by more than just warning everyone about a bad boss.
When you remove the stuff I didn't say, my point is less easily shoehorned into the right wing perspective you want it to be. It's pretty clear here that this is an opinion, not a retelling of fact. If you don't think this podcast is a little on the hard-line left side, and you don't think encouraging people to publicly quit is a risky move, that's fine. You could argue for that like I argued for this.
You don't come off as someone who wants to have good faith discussions. Instead you come off as someone who wants to bait people into replying, then go word-for-word through their reply to find any gotcha moment you can to match your spin.
In this reply chain for example, you've:
- framed me as thinking CBC is far left (a lie)
- put words in the mouth of another commenter,
- removed critical points from my comment,
- simplified my argument to a straw-man,
- tried to convert an opinion into a statement of fact by accusing me of just using "weasel words",
- inferred my motive, and
- accused me of leaving out other arguments.
This topic is inherently opinion based. I've been clear that's what I'm offering. Multiple times now you've accused me otherwise. You're free to respectfully disagree with my opinion, but this is neither respectful, nor a discussion of opinion with you at this point.
I'm not going to go any further with you down this line of conversation. Have a nice day.
I said I'm open to having my mind changed that CBC is not far left and you came up with this whole thing about them talking about how to go public if you quit from a workplace you find sexist as though it's some kind of supporting point. I called it a bad point and now you're crying about it.
>then accused me of leaving out other arguments.
Did you not?
” One of the great books this year on journalism is by Desmond Cole, talking about his experience working at The Toronto Star, what it is to be a Black journalist and how it is that objectivity props up white supremacy.”
The claim is that objectivity is impossible thus not worthy of pursuit and one should instead examine ones “location” to use your biases for good.
This is typical CBC pap. If it’s not being discussed in the elite “progressive” circles of Toronto it’s not news.
This is not new, nor exclusive to Fox. The Daily Show goes out of it's way to declare they aren't a news outlet, and Rachel Maddow also calls her program entertainment rather than news.
Daily Show: Abandon News All Ye Who Enter Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show#/media/File:TDS...
"A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow's Viewers Know She Offers Exaggeration and Opinion, Not Facts": https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
"No reasonable viewer could conclude that Maddow implied an assertion of objective fact,” the opinion penned by Judge Milan D. Smith added (read it here) of the suit OAN filed in the fall of 2020 with great flurry."
"For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context,” Bashant said in a reflection of the ever spirally and tawdry state of American political discourse. “The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion."
Fox does the same thing, presents opinion shows (23:30 of their 24 hour cycle) as news.
This means that Fox is really Mainstream Republican, opposed to MAGA and Libertarians.
Likewise, CNN is Progressive, NBC, CBS, ABC are mainstream Democrat.
This explains the rise of more alternative media to the Right of Fox, and to the Left of many of the Democrat channels.
I think there is still an untapped market around the Libertarian Left which to me doesn't really have a major newsmedia company pushing it yet.
It has really changed what is needed to get different perspectives on the same story, almost that you need to consume it from 3 channels to get all the angles. That may be a fault of newsbite sized media rather than depth which is regularly needed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI&feature=youtu.be
https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HPM70d_jT9k
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783
I’d be curious to hear yours.
The reporter used my "I want someone trustworthy" quote (without the context) and in such a way to imply I saw something in the candidate, when in reality, I was explaining that I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him. She just tossed my line in the article right after mentioning good things about the candidate. Totally and utterly misleading.
Pretty direct and eye opening to me. That reporter went out with a story in mind and used my words however she saw fit.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/07/can-physics-be-too...
https://hongkongfp.com/2020/03/29/video-top-doctor-bruce-ayl...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-jeffrey-ep...
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are-experts-real...
Wonder if that evidence, potentially implicating the rich and powerful, will ever come to light...
The disparity of coverage between such as the largest antiwar protests in history, institutional imperial torture, the Occupy movement, or bank bailouts; compared to pop-stars or sports, is soul-rocking.
Many otherwise smart people seem to accept this. They see it as normal, inevitable, and even victim blame saying that the media are "just giving people what they want".
I disagree - polls all say people want healthcare, they want Bush and Cheney held for war crimes, they want clean water and a healthy planet. People want better education and childcare and mental health support. And those otherwise smart people agree with me, then go right back to turning on the bullshit; proudly voting for the lesser but still abominable evil.
I dunno which is more "accurate" or "true", but it's a great example of how deciding what counts as noteworthy news is itself a very powerful editorial force. Where other outlets (even NPR and such) are setting aside news-coverage time to promote blockbuster films(!), the DN version of that would be promoting a documentary about indigenous-peoples issues or climate change or something. Totally different view of the world, just because of what the outlet deems worth covering.
I'm calling BS on that one. You might be able to find a poll that says that, but no, polls don't all say that. You need to look at a wider selection of polls.
Maybe something like, every poll outside of America and maybe one or two other countries that have benefited greatly from those wars since 2001.
I would like to believe that if Americans were actually informed, by a media that worked on their behalf, they'd nearly universally want to prosecute Bush and Cheney as well. How sad, if I'm wrong on that.
Have you read any of the criticisms of the book now that the historical record is much more complete around some of his claims?
While Zinn makes for entertaining reading, history is savaging much of it. I enjoyed reading it, but the more I read of contemporary sources, the more I became convinced that Zinn was giving us a very selective story without the vital nuance.
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/wineburg-histor...
[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/112574/howard-zinns-influent...
[3] https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/09/book-review-debunking-...
2. 2014 State run broadcaster claim Israeli soldiers "shoot at everything that moves".
3. 2018, 2019 and 2020 close friends of me were targeted first by a large business newspaper, then by the second biggest broadcaster, then by the largest broadcaster.
None of them had anything to back it up except spooky music, interviews with people who disliked them, medias own admissions that they don't understand international finance etc.
Meanwhile police had run undercover and official investigations based on the same sources and shut the case not because of the usual lack of resources or because they couldn't prove it but because there wasn't anything wrong.
Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals.
The unfortunate part comes when that skepticism clouds the ability to discern whether or not one is contradicting fundamental physical properties of the world. . . Not to say that those aren’t entirely up for debate either.
Manipulation is now in social media and other 'decentralized' platforms, but the money is still from the same people, just even less accountable.
I don't think it improved at all, quite the opposite in fact.
I happily pay for the WSJ and Bloomberg, though admittedly I skip all of the WSJ Opinion pieces because they can be worse than OAN
To make the articles more readable. I changed my link styling to more closely match the text styling, which can be done directly through the Wikipedia user account (using the "common.css" page).
See also this article on Judith Miller's stories from 2001-2002 (she was forced to resign from the NYT): https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/
These aren't isolated incidents, but they were particularly egregious.
NYT also ran Joseph Wilson's oped explaining the yellowcake accusations against Iraq were likely fabricated.
I even remember this thing at the Scholastic Book Fair that was basically a book-magazine thing and contained a large fold out map and a list of all the int'l military divisions that would be participating in Operation Desert Storm; essentially armchair generalship marketed to kids.
As some love to say, "[perfect] objectivity and neutrality are impossible [so the media is right in going full-on activist]". The media is having a firesale on its own credibility, and the "proceeds" are going to specific ideological causes to the detriment of society as a whole (what good can possibly come from an ideology which explicitly and routinely condemns objectivity, neutrality, rigor, etc?).
When the OP says "politicians prefer it when objective media goes away and gets replaced with advocates" and you say (paraphrasing) that "the objective media has responded to financial incentives and become advocates [so they can gain viewers and credibility with Congress]" you aren't saying anything different. You're just describing a situation in which societal and political incentives were changed to disincentivize the financial benefit of responsible reporting, and both media companies and politicians are responding to those incentives.
To then say "gosh I'm really mad at the media because they're bad" is like being mad at raindrops because they're wet. If you don't like the situation, propose an actual political or policy change that will improve the situation. I see too many people saying "I hate the media, and [my preferred politicians] rail against the media, ergo I will vote for [my preferred politicians]" failing to recognize that this dynamic simply reinforces the feedback loop rather than changing anything.
I know, hence my "to your point"
> To then say "gosh I'm really mad at the media because they're bad" is like being mad at raindrops because they're wet.
The media landscape degraded in the last ~decade. Raindrops have always been wet. I don't propose a solution because I don't understand the dynamics exactly. I don't think I have to understand the dynamics exactly (or have a solution in mind) in order to talk about the problem.
> I see too many people saying "I hate the media, and [my preferred politicians] rail against the media, ergo I will vote for [my preferred politicians]" failing to recognize that this dynamic simply reinforces the feedback loop rather than changing anything.
Of course, this doesn't describe me. Contrary to the media portrait, you can't draw any reasonable inferences about someone's politics based on whether they support or criticize the changes to the media landscape.
11% of Republicans trust the media - which is down from 14% 4 years ago. This doesn't seem like a big drop, but relatively, that is still a 20% decrease, in an already low amount.
Something is deeply wrong when half of your adult population just flat out doesn't trust you. Where do these people get their news about the world? Do they just live in a constant state of mistrust?
However, that doesn't obviate the need to have factual information about the world. Goings-on in local communities and nationally. So I am curious - where do they get their knowledge from?
Do they trust local sources and ignore national ones? Are there specific personalities they listen to? Is it all Facebook and YouTube, all of the time? Or do they just not watch, or use large grains of salt when they do watch?
Anyways, I am legitimately curious and I do think it's a problem that no one outside the left trusts the media. If that isn't a blatant condemnation of these media companies, who squandered that trust away, I don't know what is.
Sort of, but not completely in my opinion. In some sense they give people what they want, the same as Facebook giving people content that they "engage" more with (which is often negative).
Asking the media companies (who are as profit driven as anyone else) to be the adults is like asking social media companies to do the same. When it comes down to it, they will optimize for profit, and if not enough people are really interested in good journalism and reporting, that will get cut and replaced with sensationalism.
The problem is of course they're probably getting news from even less trustworthy places as you mention, but the news media simply doesn't deserve the trust of anyone in the general population.
Given the percentage of Republicans that believe the 2020 election was actually stolen, how do you justify this view? Are the outlets that Republicans DO trust providing more reputable news, or are they spewing complete nonsense that is far more wrong than the mainstream news media? Every piece of evidence I've seen points to this rather than Republicans being right.
Maybe not inherently good, but few things are. Given that people who trust the mass media, on average, have a more accurate view of what's happening in the world, it most certainly seems to be better than the alternative, does it not?
>Every piece of evidence I've seen Did you believe it when they said inflation was going to be transitory? How about when they had back-to-back headlines that Powell 'saved the economy' and that 'Billionaires quadrupled their wealth during the crisis'?
That's a pretty extreme epistemological stance to take. I can't refute it (I've personally gone down that road before), but I also don't see how one can hold that stance while also identifying with any political position at all and believing that they have solid justification for it.
>Did you believe it when they said inflation was going to be transitory?
Did "the media" say this, or did they report that that's the government's position on the matter? Has inflation proven to not be transitory?
>How about when they had back-to-back headlines that Powell 'saved the economy' and that 'Billionaires quadrupled their wealth during the crisis'?
The only place I recall ever reading that Powell saved the economy is WallStreetBets memes. Regardless of that, is the issue here that these headlines are contradictory?
>Where do these people get their news about the world?
The scary answer is likely, Facebook. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence here, but if anyone has researched it, I'd love to see an article about it.
> Do they just live in a constant state of mistrust
Likely yes. Again, going back to FB anecdota, there seems to be a significant portion of the population that mistrusts everything. Immigrants, minorities, government, anyone outside of their social group. A large portion of these peoples post are motivated by/or based on some kind of fear.
For the record I'd consider myself an independent. I voted Obama twice. So, I think it's more than just Republicans not trusting the media. MSM has lost a ton of viewers since their cash cow Trump left as well.
There is definitely an extent to which trust in the 4th estate has dropped, but I personally think it's overblown by these sorts of questions. If I was to guess, much of the drop is a change in how people consider the media in their minds. Along with becoming a loaded phrase, we are now shown more of what the media we don't personally choose to consume looks like than ever before. Now when people hear "The Media" they don't just think about the media they choose, but the media that their faction of the internet rages about. I'd be very interested in the answer to something along the lines of "What's your favorite media source?" then "How much do you trust X?"
Wonder what happened in that year to cause such a drastic change...
> In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio -- when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?
The article reports that those responding with "great deal" or "a fair amount" is the second-lowest on record.
This a global problem. Journalism is no more.
(I'll plug ProPublica, though. They do good work as a non-profit, including a series on TurboTax that has put political heat on the company's practices)
Fun aside, I think you are correct. The net inflated the value of articles and similar to art, quality didn't necessarily translate to value. Although I don't think that tech people were particularly stingy in paying writers.
I pay for news I want other people to read, not for things that I read. I read tons of scientifically illiterate, deliberately deceptive right-wing dogshit. It's worth reading, because I want to be familiar with the arguments of bad people, but I certainly don't want to economically support them.
This is a good point, and basically what got me to switch my WSJ subscription (I disagree with their editorial stance but respect their newsroom) to a recurring ProPublica donation. One too many WSJ op-eds that I didn't want to financially support.
E.g. in response to the question "Now, apart from how FREQUENTLY you use them as sources of news, we'd like to know whether or not you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from each of the following news sources. First, do you feel you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from ... ?" the source that the most people (74%) said they can trust in 2019 (the last time the question was asked) was local television news. Other local news sources also got rated more trustworthy than national ones.
I wonder how much of that is due to culture fit (reporting news in a way that matches the expectations of the people in the area) vs ease of verification (if something happened in your neighborhood, it's easier to find out whether the news is accurate than if it's about a faraway place you've never been to).
Activists and propagandists are far more honest, and are far more trusted by the public.
Do you hate mixing religion with politics? Well, law with politics, news with politics and law enforcement / millitary with politics is the same toxic mixture that ends up stealing power from the citizen, who is supposed to be the most powerful entity in a functioning democracy..
One good attempt I've seen a while back was Sagar Enjetti and Crystal Ball with a show called 'The Rising' - It's on YouTube but produced quite well.. The guy has a republican tilt and the girl supports democrat politics and they have a very good rapport with each other - which results in both calling out holes in each others argument without being adverserial..
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-t...
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/30/7-woke-rebellions-in-...
Basically what we see today in journalism is no different than 100 years ago. A very high degree of yellow journalism.
Pulitzer and Hearst became so bad that they openly called for the assassination of the US president(mckinley). Both ran basically the same call to assassinate with different authors. The realization that pulitzer and hearst had some hand in having the republican president assassinated is what got him to stop. He went back to the paper and put a stop to the yellow journalism and then put the prize in his will.
Very obvious the Hannity and Oreilly Fox news led the move, but now it's virtually everyone. It's not even just the USA. The yellow journalism coming out of the CBC is a nice steady flow.
[Edit] Some proof:
Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
Bill Gates: Gene editing can help humanity https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2018/04/bill-gat...
You can't advertise a product that is misleading or dangerous, and yet there are no such limitations (or even warnings!) on the media? Maybe media reporting should have warnings on it like medicine advertising.
Trust should be something we think about in our interactions and how we can work to improve it.
News media is sold to the general public below cost to drive eyeballs to advertising. As the saying goes, the general public aren't the customer, they're the product.
Two people can hear the same thing, and come to different conclusion of what was said.
What was said can be different from what was heard.
What was heard can be different from what was reported.
And what was reported can be different from what was reported as being reported.
s/same as/opposite of/That earns some trust. Not total trust, but a lot more than I trust the NYT today.
If the story is well cited, from a reputable publisher, and/or backed up by concrete facts, then I tend to trust is a little.
Not a lit, but a little. I am generally skeptical of most things here, though. As another poster in here said, I am always shocked by the ignorance on this site relating to things I have a ton of experience with. I have to assume that same ignorance extends to other areas as well.
That being said, in general, if a post makes it to the top of HN, it seems to be better informed than other places I go for news.
I think I get what you’re trying to say but I’m arguing it doesn’t matter. Any bad media (especially of the ideologically motivated kind) is an absolute failure.
The "Fake news" phenomenon is very real.
I’m not saying people being less hesitant because of that would be logical, but it’s one way their bias has actually killed people.
Frankly, Biden should have done so too. I think it would have been the best ethical and political move. Imagine if they did a commercial together telling people to get vaccinated.
Realize that as soon as Biden took over then there was zero chance of any conservative doing anything to help Biden “succeed” in any dimension, regardless of how many lives are on the line. You don’t see Trump on Fox News telling people to get vaccinated do you?
As per your second point, I agree. On the other side you had democratic presidential candidates saying they wouldn't take "Trump's vaccine." It's disgusting what the political divide has brought.
Is there any evidence that Trump deserves credit for this or that it was actually successful?
Objective truth always exists. It’s just a matter of gathering the data to refine our perceptions and mental models to match.
the "horse med" that Joe Rogan take is also use on human as well and his doctor prescribe it.
Got 50 seconds in and "White House tells Facebook what to say to brainwash us with" is said as the viewpoint I'm supposed to agree with.
Psaki: 'We're Flagging Problematic Posts On Facebook That Spread Disinformation'