It’s a mystery.
The New Yorker goes where every elite media pub has gone before and asks the big question.
When Americans Lost Faith in the News
You know where this begins, as usual, in the lost Eden when everyone trusted the media.
With Trump, all that changed. Trump is rude. Cordiality is not a feature of his brand. And there is no coöperation in the Trump world, because everything is an agon. Trump waged war on the press, and he won, or nearly won. He persuaded millions of Americans not to believe anything they saw or heard in the non-Trumpified media, including, ultimately, the results of the 2020 Presidential election.The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means.
Ponder the deranged claim that calling the media liars is “censorship”. When the media calls its political opponents liars is that censorship? Then again the media actively calls for censorship of its opponents.
Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent.
Why? Maybe it’s the constant non-stop lies.
The level of media trust steadily declined since 1976. By the 90s, it was at 50 percent. Aside from occasional dives into the 40s, it tended to stay there in the oughts until 2008.
What happened in 2008? Obama. The media whored out whatever shreds of its credibility to launch a full-scale cult of personality campaign for Obama. Under Obama, media trust dipped to 40 and by 2016 hit 32.
Louie could have told New Yorker readers this rather than pretending that Trump arrived and somehow brainwashed the public into not trusting the media. The statistics are there. But the media can’t help lying.
And then it wonders why no one has any faith in the news.
Here, let me help you guys out.
“Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust” – Leonard Downie Jr / Washington Post:
The only ones those newsrooms build trust with are the likeminded.
While the New Yorker repeats the same old cliches, the media is suffering with both sides of the political spectrum. Having abandoned even the pretense of objectivity, the right openly hates the media, centrists distrust it as a partisan organ and for many lefties the media is insufficiently biased.
Everyone hates the media and no one trusts it. Everyone expects it to repeat its propaganda and hates it when it doesn’t.
And the media did that to itself when it decided to turn into an echo chamber for a guy named Barry.
I don’t know if there’s a way back. Colbert’s old producer at CNN claims he’s trying, but I’m not so sure our society even has a way back. And most of the media isn’t bothering. It’ll just dust off the old lies and repeat them again while insisting that it needs to be even more biased. Back to Louie at the New Yorker.
“In the memoir slash manifesto “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s), Margaret Sullivan argues that objectivity is not so much impossible today as meaningless, and that the press ought to stop striving to achieve it. The events of 2020 and 2021 showed that the press’s values were in the wrong place. “The extreme right wing had its staunch all-in media allies,” she writes. “The rest of the country had a mainstream press that too often couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do their jobs. Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy.”
The problem is the media is too objective and not biased enough. When all it does is scream through a megaphone, “OUR POLITICAL ENEMIES ARE EVIL AND MUST BE BUTCHERED IN THE STREETS” 24 hours a day, then finally public trust in the media will be restored.
“The power of the press, such as it is, is like the power of academic scholars, scientific researchers, and Supreme Court Justices. It is not backed by force. It rests on faith: the belief that these are groups of people dedicated to pursuing the truth without fear or favor. Once they disclaim that function, they will be perceived in the way everyone else is now perceived, as spinning for gain or status.”
The lack of self-awareness is truly astounding. But if they were self-aware, they wouldn’t be the media.
I just plain quit watching and reading the fake news over 20 years ago i have gone Cold turkey on the whole misinformation Daily News NBC,ABC,CBS and CNN and the printed fake news as well
Newsmax and Real America’s Voice are good news networks and the Epoch Times is a good newspaper. I heard One America’s News is a good network too but I don’t know because it isn’t on my TV and I can’t be bothered to register on its stupid website.
One America is available on the Roku stick, but there is a $5/month charge. I recently subscribed to Fox Nation, mainly for Tucker Carlson’s documentaries and interviews, but all those charges do add up.
That’s exactly what I avoid. No cable, Roku sticks or subscriptions. Newsmax and Real America’s Voice came free on my TV and they’re more than good enough for me.
Cable is expensive and quite frankly, sucks. ATT/Direct TV just de-platformed Newsmax because it’s conservative and deprived it of 13 million of its viewers, who also got the short end of the stick. It de-platformed OAN last year.
I stream Carlson and Gutfeld when I want to watch them. People put their shows up the same day they air, the rascals. 🙂
“Lost faith in the news”
Can we just get past Trump at some stage?
Not until we have a stronger candidate on the side of freedom. Right now, the only two conceivable Republican presidential candidates are Trump and DeSantis, and Trump is the stronger of the two as well as DeSantis being too much of an unknown quantity. (He has, for example, a lot of support from precisely the wrong people, which raises some suspicions.)
Of course, unless the Republican Party leadership decides it wants to win and puts an end to Democratic ballot fraud, both Trump and DeSantis would “lose” in 2024 to whomever the Democrats choose to run.
DeSantis is viewed by the legacy media as more dangerous than Trump because he is a winner who governs well and rejects woke views across the board
No, it’s the opposite. They view DeSantis as the weaker candidate, which is why they push him as a candidate, just like they did to Trump in 2016.
It’s a moot point because he’s Governor until 2027 and has young children aged 2, 4 and 6. No way would he be irresponsible enough to relocate his family to the White House in the DC Sewer. That’s no place for toddlers.
The DeSantis push is a never Trumper fantasy and fake news media ploy. Don’t fall for it.
The election is next year so no.
Trump is the best news Dems ever got
In what way? They’re deathly afraid of him.
Both Trump and DeSantis show people how barren and insane the left really is.. People recognize leadership and stability and that doesn’t exist with the left who continually devise evil plans to derail civilization. The left hasn’t been winning elections on their policies, character, or their merits or by honest votes, they have been stealing them., what a shallow victory for shallow people.
“the lost Eden when everyone trusted the media.”
The days of Walter Cronkite.
who wasn’t impartial or innocent either, please!
I liked his “New Year’s from Vienna” concerts 🙂
“The most trusted man in America” who lied his ASS off about the Tet Offensive.
The NV and Viet Cong lost a million men, nearly all they fielded, and Wally said it was a victory for them and crushing defeat for America. What a lying sack of shit.
if they were ever self aware at all, they wouldn’t be leftists.
True.
A lot of this is true.
Also, every single point also applies to you. You are part of the media. You trot out propaganda and lies, the same old talking points over and over again. You accuse your opponents of being evil liars. You read everything to the prism of your bias, and what you expect will be the bias of your readers.
Yes, there is a crisis of credibility in the media today. No, Trump is not exclusively to blame. But you are part of the problem. A little self awareness on your part would be good.
“You trot out propaganda and lies, the same old talking points over and over again.”
Specify the “lies” or retract & apologize. Doesn’t your groundless accusation indict you no less?
You can hurl whatever accusations you like, but, unlike the media, I don’t claim that “democracy” depends on people trusting me or set up infrastructure for censoring those I disagree with.
You don’t want to trust or believe me or Front Page? Fine. Go read your outlet of choice.,
But when the public doesn’t trust the media, the media describes this as a threat to democracy and a conspiracy that requires suppressing “disinformation”.
See the difference? It’s called freedom.
You and FPM spend 99.9% of your time saying that anyone to the left of Alex Jones is about to annihilate America, democracy, and freedom and usher in a commufascinazi regime.
I really don’t think you have much room to talk.
That’s a ridiculous accusation.
What’s true is that you Dirtbagocrat lefties spend most of your time claiming that anybody to the right of Hitler “is a threat to (non-existent) democracy” and wants to annihilate America and enforce a fascist regime. When you fascist, deplatforming, shadow banning, cancel culture hate mongers aren’t doing that, you’re pushing destructive horse shit about white supremacy, CRT, white skin privilege and black victimhood. And when you aren’t doing that, you’re pushing gender bender nonsense, the Alphabet People’s tyranny and grooming children.
I really don’t think you have much room to talk.
You realize that your ranting basically proves my point, right?
You just described every Dirtbagocrat, left-wing, fake journalist in the country., not Greenfield. You left-wing scum always accuse normal people of your actions and words. You’re all ridiculous but dangerous. Lies can be very destructive and you lot’s are all reverse reality.
The legacy media also hated Nixon and Reagan as well-Nixon was seen as exploiting fears on law and order and the Warren Court but recognized China, entered into detente with the FSU, helped Israel in 1973( which McGovern would not have if he had been elected) and kept up school busing-thus stealing the Democrats agenda and being reelected by a landslide in 1972. Reagan was hated because as a conservative he wanted to roll back the Deep State , stood for a strong and unapologetic America and not appease the FSU and presided over the end of the Cold War . This mutated into hysteria over the election of and policies of Trump-who also recognized the openly woke partisanship of the legacy media
They hated every Republican since the FDR days. But the hate campaign didn’t really amp up until Nixon. They took shots at Eisenhower, but there wasn’t really material to work with and the public was much less tolerant of it.
My epiphany came when CNN lit up the beachead of Mogadishu during the Marine landing, risking the lives of those Marines. Despicable then, despicable now.
Who is the real problem in this story? The media that lies or the audiences that keep returning for more lies?
When the mass media opted to to openly display their bias and prejudice through propaganda and advancing their liberal agenda as opposed to reporting the news objectively, they created a path leading to the death of journalism. Rather than being manipulated by these sources, people no longer subscribe to or even pay attention to them. Contempt for the truth is deadly.
Didn’t they do that I Iraq, too? Those Marines should’ve blown them away.What truth? The fake news media trolls lie every time they open their mouth or type some tripe.
Well said!!
Now let’s do Weapons of mass destruction, Manmade climate change, Safe and effective, Russia Russia Russia, Mostly peaceful protests, You like your doctor you can keep your doctor…..Just off the top of my head!!!
The NYT’s had their leftists propagandists Walter Duranty and Herb Mathews who covered up for Stalin and Castro their also behind the 1619 project