Americans' Trust in Media Remains Near Record Low
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
When media actually relied on ad revenue, it was not so partisans. Advertisers wanted bland stuff that appealed to everyone. It's the subscription model that drives partisanship. People want to pay to support stuff that they agree with.
It doesn’t make accounting sense, but neither does politics. Media is power.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Do you have a source for this?
> Advertisers wanted bland stuff that appealed to everyone.
Do you have a source for this? From my point of view a larger audience will drive the price up so I fail to see a correlation. Also, a broader audience leads to less targeted audience, so that seems cost-ineffiecient
> It's the subscription model that drives partisanship.
Do you have a source for this?
> People want to pay to support stuff that they agree with.
Do you have a source for this?
You are framing a bouquet of personal opinions as facts here.
Do you have a source for this?
I don’t see you posting any evidence “debunking” these claims. Just more of your own opinion. Pretty annoying double standard in arguing.
There are many media outlets that specialize in selling the reality that a large enough population wishes to be true. These are the outlets people who don’t trust “the media” are gravitating to.
Which ones don't do that? It's hard to find journalists who are not activists, or at the very least do not toe the line.
“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?”
I do think the question should be clarified though.
More skeptical, my ass.
I see this said a lot but I don't think that's a simple request, assuming what we're really saying here is "objective facts, not opinions". There's a finite amount of news you can report so which objective facts you choose to show your readers is in itself a subjective decision of "newsworthiness". And how do you present that news to your audience? Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
I’m also very dubious that you could build a sustainable business around such an idea. I think a lot of people say they want objective news but when presented with a choice they’ll favour media that caters to their existing biases.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of garbage media out there today and it can absolutely get better. But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
Maybe we don't need 18 different 24/7 "news" channels? That's why we have these "filler" programs.
>But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
News isn't sexy. News doesn't sell. Stoking emotions does, and that's why we are where we are. Even in the days of the newspaper, the OpEd section is what got attention.
Note in this context, "there's a finite number of news you can report", means the constraint is you (the reporter), not the news. The news is effectively infinite, it's the organization doing the reporting the one which has a finite "bandwidth" and must pick and choose, introducing unavoidable subjectivity in the process.
So there may be "filler programs", but the reason for them is not that there are not enough actual news to report.
The act of choosing what to report and what to leave out is a subjective act, just like the same photo cropped differently can tell opposite stories!
So there is yellow and bad journalism, but even "good" journalism cannot be objective.
That applies to fact checkers too. Anything ideologically inconvenient will be ignored.
> Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
How is getting a list of things that have happened each day awful? What's better than RSS?
The “trust media” crowd are the bourgeois who watched the Iraq War lies then tell you with a straight face the same people are being honest with you about Ukraine.
But I do think the media is openly propagandizing, including false information from “permanent state” pundits, eg former military officials.
And my linking the two is that it’s literally the same people — eg, Victoria Nuland, who after Iraq moved on to Euromaidan and the Ukraine mess.
> From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War. From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.
> Nuland was the lead U.S. point person for the Revolution of Dignity, establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard. Along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, she is seen as a leading supporter of defensive weapons delivery to Ukraine.
Why would the bureaucrats who lied to us and failed in Iraq and Afghanistan be honest people leading us in the right direction now?
Were the issue of trust really about a fairly and accurately reporting news, you'd expect the drop in trust in "mass media" to coincide with the rise of alternative media that does a better job on just reporting the news. But instead what you see is a rise in source that are basically just partisan propaganda barely even pretending to be legitimate news sources. This is especially true on the right side of the American political spectrum, where the biggest drop in mass media trust happens to be. If Republican problems with mainstream media is that the media doesn't just report the news, it seems odd that this would have led to the rise of Fox News and then Newsmax and OAN when Fox wasn't partisan enough.
This isn't just a Republican problem, although as they have the biggest shift in media trust I think it's fair to use them as the example. But overall, I think a simple explanation is that Americans increasingly see facts as subjective, and therefore the trustworthy news source is the one that provides me with facts that fit my existing worldview. There's a super obvious Trump divergence on the trust graph between Republicans and Democrats. Was it the case that Democrats suddenly thought the media was doing a better job just reporting the news and Republicans somehow came to the opposite conclusion? Or was it just that the Democrats liked the negative Trump coverage and Republicans didn't?
What's it like to live in a different culture having substantial trust in media, government and institutions?
It starts with teaching intellectual self-defence at an early age.
In Finland, social resilience is also considered a part of national security (see my paper here [2]), instead of considering national security as only the interests of a few industrial oligarchs.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/how-finland-can-help-us...
I feel like in the USA context however. If they started doing this, it would be immediate civil war. From my point of view the social fabric of the usa requires the government to control what their people see in the news. Including social media.
Obviously it's rather opaque and people see it for what it is hence the original poll.
Although I think there are biases encoded in these poll results. For example, people are now more annoyed than ever when confronted with opinions that go against their own. This might make it more likely that they would report distrust in the media. They may be talking mostly about the liberal or conservative media without saying that explicitly.
Conspiracy theories used to be relatively harmless. They're how we got Stargate and X-Files. I can't just live and let live when the view I disagree with is the view is that there's a secret queer cabal indoctrinating children. That kind of claim has consequences that "maybe capital gains could be lower" doesn't.
Meet Edgar Welch[0] and Mark Finchem[1].
There are many others and you may not actually meet those folks in person, but there are plenty of folks who take conspiracy theories seriously. Ignore that at your (and that of the rest of us) peril.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong#Pizzagate_cons...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Finchem#Response_to_the_2...
Edit: Correction, Edgar Welch was released from prison this past March.
Remember the satanic panic?
Whether you liked his show or not, this is now basically the model of journalism today. Left and right. The people who did all the hard work - actual interviewing and source gathering and factual reporting - are an increasingly small slice of news. You now have an ecosystem that just reprocesses the same stories over and over again from the same small set of primary sources.
Wow, that partisan divide.
A much better poll would be about trust in explicit news sources, which would lead to the obvious conclusion that everyone trusts the sources of news they subscribe to, those sources create a particular reality, and that sources that paint pictures of different realities aren't trust-able.
Rs don't trust Fox either. They called AZ for Biden early. Neil Cavuto clowned himself over Trump taking HCQ. Tucker Carlson helped bury the Hunter Biden laptop story. Nobody trusts Fox on either side.
A 2013 study showed that journalists had increasingly identified as independent rather than Democrat or Republican. Only 28% Democrat, lower than at any time in the previous 40 years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...
https://larswillnat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2013-america...
“Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.”
-Noam Chomsky.
Oh, wait he's not a republican.
The media industry ironically has a huge image problem - at its roots is the fact that their incentives do not align with their readership - they've actually made that readership a product to be sold to the highest bidder.
And yet the independents see this much closer to how the Republicans see it. I find that somewhat surprising.
Could be telling us that the most of the (non-Fox) media leans left, and the independents see it but the Democrats don't.
I don't know why this should be assumed. Is there any evidence that independents are more informed than other groups?
A lot of political independents pay very little if any attention to politics, except perhaps right before an election.
What do you mean by biased?
You can probably say that on average, independents are less biased than Democrats in favor of Democrats and against Republicans, and correspondingly less biased than Republicans in favor of Republicans and against Democrats, although this may not apply to some individual independents.
However, I don't view politics as a line. The terms "left" and "right" were based on seating charts in a legislature. The realm of politics and political views is vastly broader than encompassed by relatively narrow range of the American Democratic and Republican parties, and moreover, there are vehement, nasty disputes even within those parties. So in the broader sense, I would say that every individual person has there own idiosyncratic views, which may or may not overlap well with some political party, and the whole notion of being "unbiased" is somewhat questionable.
Let me put it another way: if scientists say the Earth is over 4 billion years old, and creationists say the Earth is less than 10 thousand years old, should we expect the truth to the somewhere in the middle? Should we ask the agnostics?
More to the point, though, I don't know that it matters. I wouldn't expect them to have a particular useful view on the matter or take them as an authority because they're supposedly "unbiased".
I am a registered member of the Democratic Party.
That said, I am not a fan of either the US Democratic or Republican parties. I find both parties less interested in governing and more interested in maintaining/increasing their power.
But still, I'm a registered Democrat. Why is that? Where I live (NYC), the electorate is ~5:1 D/R. As such, a win in local (city council, Comptroller, etc.) and state (assembly, senate, etc.) Democratic primaries generally assures victory in the general election.
As such, I made the choice a bunch of years ago to change my party registration to the Democratic party.
Does that mean I see issues through "blue-tinted glasses"? I think not.
I'd also point out that I tend to be much more libertarian (small 'l') WRT social issues (equality of opportunity, stay the hell out of peoples' bedrooms and doctors' offices, personal freedom of expression, privacy, etc.), but also a strong advocate of living wages and a very strong government supported safety net.
I have some ideas about why all that is for the good, and have even discussed (especially free expression and a strong safety net) here on HN.
As should be obvious, neither party really supports positive change in most of the issues I find important. One more so than the other, but still woefully inadequate.
Regardless, I choose who I vote for based on my perception/understanding of the candidates' themselves, not which party's line on which these folks are running.
Perhaps I'm an outlier, and folks just vote whatever their family/peer group votes.
I'd say that I'd tend toward a strong belief in the idea that a "well educated electorate is essential to democratic self-rule." (usually, and incorrectly, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but it's not who said it that matters, but that it's true).
We're falling down on that point (lots of others too, but who's counting?) and need to make sure that by the time an American citizen reaches the age of 18, they understand the US system of government in a reasonable amount of detail, both from conceptual and practical standpoints. You'd think that would be a no-brainer, but apparently (and unfortunately) not.
And that applies to many members of both the major, center right (Democratic) and further right (Republican) parties in the US.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one that's easily fixable, at least for future generations. I'm not holding my breath.
Well, yeah. That big jump when Trump got elected isn't because the media suddenly became much more trustworthy and only the Democrats figured it out.
Also, "the media" is not uniform. Politically speaking, the media includes the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, FOX News, Breitbart, The Lever, The American Prospect, etc. Does anyone trust or distrust those equally?
You probably shouldn't. I read media reports that Ian was in the top N (maybe 3?) storms ever to hit Florida. That is so far from the truth it isn't even funny, just sickening.
National weather-related media mostly plays to left coast biases: it treats routine hurricanes (and other routine windstorms) as existential risks but the threat of major earthquakes (for example) as routine.
I really feel that if we brought this back, we’d have more trust in the media
In a world where signal and noise were limited and rationed to particular actors, the fairness doctrine made sense. Now there is no structural limit on signal or noise and so they can not be distinguished.
The problem isn't what the media pedals, it's that the media that is most emotional engaging or comforting is also the most desirable. People will choose the media that reflects the most comfortable reality for them. A coal miner is going to prefer to watch media that says coal mining is here to stay rather than media that says in 5 years there will be no more coal mining.
You and I might optimize for media we find the most truthful, but most people are going to prefer the media that makes them most comfortable (even if that comfort is a state of constantly being enraged), and now that's not limited by the different broadcast frequencies, it is only limited by a person's time to scroll until they find a message they like.
Kind of reminds me of when actors tell people who vote Republican not to see their movies, then are shocked when they flop. I genuinely don’t think these people realize how large the “other” is because they never interact with them in real life
Some people get it. From before the 2016 election:
<http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...>
<http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...> (so, so prophetic in why the Rust Belt broke for Trump)
and after:
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugne...>
The New York Times pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...> that
>Whatever the election result, you're going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn't a place, it's a state of mind — it's in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump in 2016), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
>Kind of reminds me of when actors tell people who vote Republican not to see their movies, then are shocked when they flop. I genuinely don’t think these people realize how large the “other” is because they never interact with them in real life
The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael didn't actually say "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him" in 1972.
She did say, however <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael>:
>I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.
If you think that there is no meaningful difference, you would be correct.
Bush 2004: Michigan 47.81% Pennsylvania 48.42% Wisconsin 49.32%
Trump 2016: Michigan 47.5% Pennsylvania 48.18% Wisconsin 47.22%
Despite this, Bush lost all 3 states, while Trump won all 3 states. The difference is that Clinton significantly underperformed other Democratic candidates.
There was a big 3rd party vote surge in 2016, 4% higher than in 2012 or 2020, led by Gary Johnson, and also a bit by Jill Stein. One could argue that this was due to dissatisfaction with Clinton, but in any case, it seemed to hurt Clinton more than Trump -- who ended up losing all 3 states in 2020 despite performing slightly better in them than 2016.
Furthermore, those same elites - for all their education - don't understand how truth works. That is, trust is *earned*. Full stop. As it is, they believe they can bully their way into being trusted simply by relentlessly pounding their fist-to-desk and demanding they be trusted. They whine that we have it wrong, and they're always right.
Would it be wrong to say I hope they choke on that silver spoon in their mouth?
The real "branches" of a civil society are the media/information branch, the business branch, the civilian branch, the military/enforcement branch, and the legal branch. All the real checks and balances exist in the inter-relations between those structures.
Consider the conflict in Ukraine, for example, where the "most informed" citizens simply believe Russia entered Ukraine unprovoked in a blatant act of aggression. They have never heard of the Donbass region. They have never heard of the Donetsk People's Republic, and they have no information about the attrition war waged on these people by the fervently anti-Russian, ultra-nationalist regime in Kiev over the past eight years.
Always ask yourself, does certain article benefit the writer or the writers' sponsors, and always assume the worst.
Instead, if you don't know anything about a topic, would you trust a report in one of the publications about the same topic? Intuitively, if NYT covers something I have no idea of previously and I want to get more context, I would probably go there, regardless of how much I trust NYT. I trust them enough to be a starting point and would likely believe a lot of what they say.[1]
Then, if a person is scared of something - insert any hypothetical scenario - they are more likely to trust a publication which echoes those opinions. And in turn reject the publications which do not. This partially explains why the trust is so high for Democrats, and gone up during the time of Trump.
[1]: Lately, I have been relying on FT, and some Substacks, but thats probably just me.
I agree, I’m not really sure what not trusting the media means. I generally speaking think in broad strokes the New York Times and NPR try to get the facts right.
But I suspect this basically means less that they think they are objectively wrong and more that they don’t share their perspective, and people seem to focus more on the high profile mishaps and less on the day to day. No one would be trustworthy if you only focused on our high profile mishaps.
I just pulled up cnn.com as I think most people would agree that's a pretty mainstream/middle of the road outlet (I'm sure half will complain it's the Clinton News Network and the other half will whine that it's right of center, or whatever). I see: Trump secret documents (seven articles in a little cluster on the left third of the page), some guy got convicted of a murder from 1996, another murder, hair-straightening products linked to uterine cancer, murder, rape, murder, murder, rape, Ukraine, murder, Ukraine, flesh eating bacteria, something about Elon Musk, something else about Trump, and sleeping less than 5 hours a night is apparently not good for you.
I'm sure all of it is quite accurately reported. I would bet my life that the picture of the man convicted of the 1996 murder of Kristin Smart displayed on cnn.com really is a picture of the man who was convicted and not a picture of some other man who was not convicted of the 1996 murder.
For me it's not "fairness" or "bias" but just that I am sick of hearing about murders, Trump, Ukraine, and celebrity gossip so I no longer tune in, or go to the websites, or read anything from the news. I get much the same vibe if I pull up foxnews.com or rt.com or what have you.
I would say it's not that I don't trust large news organizations to accurately report objective facts. They seem to do this about as well as anyone could ask. It's rather that I don't trust them to inform me in any way that makes my life better or makes me a better person. I'm not sure what the term is for this, something which is true but has zero relevance in your life and also makes you depressed. To me it's just a bad bargain.
Maybe life was better when media was more local and instead of CNN I would pick up a copy of the town newspaper and read about things actually happening in my town, done by people I might actually know (or only be 1-2 degrees of separation from), stories about places I live and work on a daily basis and stories written by people who don't live very far from me. I didn't get to experience that so I can't say either way.
Yeah no. I can't even agree with you that it's a news outlet. It's "entertainment news" designed to get an emotional response, just like all cable news channels. If you go there looking for information, expect to be disappointed (or fooled).