38% of population has no trust in the media, 28% has not very much confidence.
About 2/3 of folks don't trust the media.
I wish "the media" would go back to reporting the news instead of repeating talking points.
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?