People of all stripes seem quite happy to trust news as long as it delivers facts that already fit their worldview
"""Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media -- such as newspapers, television and radio -- first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year."""
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
And these stats hold for liberals as well; they feel their outlet isn't the "MSM", but that Fox is and is untrustworthy.
Since the job of news is now to sell ads and not tell the truth, a lot of "supporters" only hear what their side wants them to hear, and not the facts.
The real problem of course is that each party has different policies; but if we as citizens don't agree on the facts and problems facing us, then there is no way to evaluate the strength of the policies against the problems.
Bias in news has always been a problem, and I think you just have to listen to a variety of sources with different biases to find out the truth.
It’s not like journalists are collectively agreeing to lie to the public.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust...
People are supporting politicians because there is literally nothing else to do but not vote. Also, personally, I expect a politician to lie while holding a journalist to a higher standard. We need proper journalism to hold the government accountable.
This in turn causes low trust because if one type of article is manipulative then the other types must be right?
If people weren’t so anti-capitalism then the journalism would have incentive to be less manipulative across the board.
Furthermore the politicians want manipulative journalism, there is no incentive on either side to do the right thing. If there was we wouldn’t have the political candidates we do today.
Instead we invest in the weakness because be uneducated means you don’t actually have to understand just vote emotionally.
I'm struggling to put into words the thoughts this sentence triggered. We're on HN, not reddit, so I'm going to assume good faith.
What reasons over the past 30-50 years have capitalists given the population to root for them? When your business model is to fuck over everyone in your path in a race to the bottom for the gain of a select few at the top, why would anyone expect anything else from the people capitalism stomps all over?
The average American maintains finances by putting their money in a bank where it rots with inflation, of course they get stomped by capitalism.
The most fascinating part of Trump's success is that his supporters know he's lying, exaggerating and making stuff up on the spot and are ok with it. They believe he supports the things they support in a general sense and they believe all politicians lie and cheat, so they don't care even about his most egregious stuff.
I think there's a Dunning-Kruger effect, where people think they're being savvy about a corrupt system. The belief is that the whole edifice of American institutions is really just a facade on top of a corrupt system controlled by elites, and that Trump is being honest in a sense by exposing the corruption, but that his own obvious corruption is just a requirement to succeed in the way the game is played.
And of course Trump makes great use of this. The more he can get people to believe that the other side are liars and crooks, the more they'll tolerate his corruption and lies.
It does not matter whether you're talking about the broadcast and cable television media (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), the new wave media of online-first reporting (All the properties of Conde Nast and Ziff Davis, incl. Wired, Vice, Cracked, Buzzfeed, etc.), or even the third-generation blogosphere (Substack, Medium). There's no trust because success is inversely correlated with trustworthiness.
Anything real-time can't be reported on either, because choosing what to report on is a form of bias - even reporting on the latest mass shooting is "Giving coverage to someone that shouldn't be glorified", or "Only showing negatives for the second amendment". There is no way to please people without admitting bias, and then detractors will use tgat to tear down your "unbiased, facts-only" source.
A litmus test for recent journalism is the hunter Biden laptop story.
And the reason is that most journalists nowadays believe that presenting other views is harmful[1]
Most boomers and their children grew up in an unusual period in news when broad and balanced coverage was expected, and even somewhat required in the TV news. "Yellow journalism" is back, though, and we haven't quite adjusted (compare abc news coverage of Biden's plagiarism and lying in the 1980s to their coverage of his mental decline during his presidency)
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/07/13/u-s-journ...
It's really not. Stories about the families of politicians are better suited for tabloids. They're a distraction at best.
And let's be honest: only a total ignoramus would vote or change their vote based on Hunter Biden. There are a million better reasons.
That was a lie
No, that's not what they said. Here's what they said: "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...
> The laptop exists. It's contents exist.
So what?
Several Republican-led Congressional committees found no wrongdoing by Joe Biden in the matter. So yes, it's nothing but a tabloid story.
The media reports a million lies verbatim, because politicians lie.
That was known to any journalists who chose not to report on it
At the time there were two clear and obvious issues; the provenance was sketchy (material may easily have been added or deleted), and the source (Hunter) was a drug addict.
The "Yeah, my dad's totally on board with this" suffered from both, it may have been fake material added to discredit Biden (hindsight suggests not) OR (just as damning) it's the utterance of a crackhead bignoting an endeavour for credability.
What followed was one partisan media wing endlessly blowing up nothing of substance into a fabricated conspiracy, the other arm either ignoring the nothing of substance or lamely addressing why it was nothing.
You yourself acknowledge this in the framing you used: "showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that .."
The two problematic italics were precisely why knowledgable and honest journalists chose to not endlessly report on it.
That's an example of a story not going anywhere, it's commonplace.
What is less common is partisan hacks circling back like a dog to its own vomit and spending months of news cycles pumping up a cardboard outline as a real live bit of news.