The American people are quite correct to be skeptical of a media industry corrupted by the ad revenue model, riven by partisanship and unified only by contempt for the people it proclaims to serve. Grounds for optimism that we are beginning to see through it
> The American people are quite correct to be skeptical of a media industry corrupted by the ad revenue model, riven by partisanship
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.
good argument, though I would counter by saying that partisanship is more to do with the decline of regional newspapers / broadcasters vs the nationals. Bigger market means you can afford to play to extremes to capture one edge of it, rather than cater for the whole
This is an isolated demand for rigor[1]. You didn't demand a citation for the claim that the media is corrupted by ads, and the implication that that's related to partisanship.
> When media actually relied on ad revenue, it was not so partisans.
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.
>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
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.
“The media” has become coded language. People who boast that they don’t trust “the media” usually still trust in bias-confirming media.
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.
The survey question asks about trust in “mass media,” which most would interpret as corporate media outlets. I doubt survey respondents would consider stuff like AlterNet and The Daily Wire to be “mass media,” even though they report on the news. Here’s the exact survey question:
“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.
i once thought the same way, but I've since changed my view. The more crap we see / hear, the more we train ourselves on aggregate to be more skeptical of narratives we're fed
This might be true for you, and hopefully for me, but for the average person I'd bet more money on them just doubling down on <source of confirmation bias> than becoming more skeptical.
I wish I shared your optimism. But one look at the current conspiracy theory laden landscape would suggest you're wrong, I'm afraid. People believe what they want to believe.
Spend only 5 minutes with some of my neighbors, who somehow manage to cram the whole enchilada of how Bill Gates changes our genes through mosquitoes, how the Rotschilds rule the world, how vaccines contain metals, how Hitler was forced to do his thing by the US, how all Jews left Ukraine one week before the war, etc. etc. etc. into that short timeframe — and completely unasked for, of course. They just HAVE to tell it.
I think they gain a semblance of perceived control or perhaps a sense of superiority believing these things. Everyone else is wrong or part of the conspiracy and aren’t they clever for having figured it all out. When I run into folks like this they seem so happy with themselves.
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 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.
> Maybe we don't need 18 different 24/7 "news" channels? That's why we have these "filler" programs.
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.
Everyone loves to complain about 24/7 cable news (I do too, I hate it) but the actual audience numbers for the stuff is pretty low, all things considered. It’s the super incendiary stuff spreading across Facebook like wildfire that causes the real problems, IMO.
Its a problem with the 24/hr newscycle. Back in the day you would hear the news at 6 on your television, or on your radio. Now, due to the constant need for content, news has gotten more extreme. Fox and CNN need something constantly on their channels, news sites need constant content on their websites, etc. The news at 6 is no longer a thing, and that fact feels like it has hurt just about everything
I think the comment you are replying to is saying that "the news" cannot be reported on objectively simply because there is more "news" that can be reported on than any given news organization's available bandwidth (with print papers this is immediately obvious, since the limitation is physical space; but it also affects any other medium).
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.
I agree with them, but local "news at 6" shows tend to feel more balanced when I watch them, because they only have about 30 to 60 minutes to report what they need. Only the most important stuff can be reported, due to the inherent restrictions of the medium. Its not perfect. Like you said choosing not to report something is a bias in itself, and local news shows aren't exempt of this. But also, they have an incentive to report stories that their area will find significant, so I prefer it
> 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".
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 problem I see is instead of reporting facts, I see alot of stories with these words in their title - "maybe", "could", "possibly, "potentially". I think its all about churning out volume(of stories) to generate clicks. Maybe the solution is to get a paper subscription.
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.
No — Ukraine is closer to our illicit Cold War activities in Latin America, where we train questionable militias who engage in ethnic attacks.
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?
You could draw maybe a closer analogue to the first Gulf War than to the Iraq War. Of course the direct involvement of Russia makes neither all that close of a comparison.
I think it's easy to blame "the media" for poll results like this and to be fair I do think they deserve some of the blame. But I also don't think Americans' trust in the media is shaped by reasonable (or even coherent) criteria, and for that reason "just report the news" seems unlikely to be the solution.
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.
TIL about finland. I assume this is done largely due to who your neighbour is, st petersburg isnt far eh?
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.
Seems justified, no? Feels like you have to search pretty hard for dispassionate, factual accounts of important events.
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.
It was easier to disagree without annoyance before those views got so disagreeable. There's a huge difference between a minor disagreement over taxes and dealing with someone vomiting conspiracy theories about litter boxes for furries at school and secret trafficking operations at pizza parlors.
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.
I’ve never met anybody who takes conspiracy theories seriously. I think it’s the media, sadly, blowing it out of proportion, and that most conspiracy theorists are in it for the for kicks
>I’ve never met anybody who takes conspiracy theories seriously. I think it’s the media, sadly, blowing it out of proportion, and that most conspiracy theorists are in it for the for kicks
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.
Do you know those people personally? Or are they people who the media cherry picked to make it seem like there is a wave of conspiracy theories sweeping the nation in order to get clicks? There have always been cranks out there, so you can’t just pick a couple and say “point made.”
For a person who was critical of everything around him, I don't think Jon Stewart got enough flak for his part in all of this. He regularly deflected criticism of when his show was blatantly being inaccurate or misleading. Even when he was presented with troubling studies about his show was the primary source of news for a growing body of young people.
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.
I have to wonder though, how many of those Republicans count Fox News as "the media"? Somehow despite being the biggest media of all they have somehow managed to define the media as everyone else.
I completely agree. This poll is non-sensical since "the media" is an indirect reference. The question is more about what the indirect reference points to rather than about the state of our information apparatus itself.
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.
>I have to wonder though, how many of those Republicans count Fox News as "the media"?
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.
We don't trust it that much. We see OK you through in a couple solid commentators, like the guy in the plaid, but that's it, and that's all the trust they get. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch after all, and they do some incredibly Democrat bullshit things all the time.
Check out the generational difference that exists for those who identify as Republicans. 6% for age range 35-54. Whereas those younger and older was relatively higher.
I doubt it, and also hope not. The Republican party has reinvented itself before, and the internal Democratic Party governance structure would probably not do a very good job of reflecting the will of the people without the outside forcing function that the Republicans provide sometimes.
There is absolutely an inverse relationship here, but it's between "post-modernism," incorrectly labeled liberalism, and education. Most students attending American/West European universities have unfortunately been indoctrinated by New Left ideology instead of being "educated."
What you call liberalism today is proof of the absolute stranglehold of the New Left and post-modernist ideology over Western intellectuals. Allan Bloom wrote about it in "The Closing of the American Mind" discussing how Frankfurt School nihilists such Herbert Marcuse and Michele Foucault and post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida burrowed into the Ivy League (later the rest of academia) beginning after WWII, fully taking off in the 60s.
New Left liberalism and post-modernism are unfortunately the bastard children of Nietzschean Nihilism. The belief that truth is relative is contrary to Enlightenment values of reason and fact based observations. Of course, post-modernists believe that Enlightenment thinkers were racists because they were white Europeans and math is racist because Europeans systematized modern math (never mind that the founding fathers of Algebra and Trigonometry were mostly Persians). Be that as it may, please spare us the lecture about how Liberals "believe in science" and conservatives are close minded.
There is nothing Liberal about mainstream American culture, as it is the product of Frankfurt School ideology (Please read Herbert Marcuse essay on A critique of Pure Tolerance)and what you call "Conservatism" is actually classical liberalism. So dear Alice, welcome Through the Looking-Glass aka America in 2022!
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.
I think you're conflating "leftist" with "voting Clinton in order to avoid a Trump presidency". You're also conflating Hillary Clinton with leftism, when she is a centrist whose policy could have lined up with Reagan in the 80s.
To get an idea of why the republicans lost trust. There's a great quote from a leading republican.
“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.”
Check the graphic in TFA. The trend is downwards across party lines. There was a bump (from 50s to 70s) for dems when trump was elected but it continued a downtrend from that peak - even while he was in office.
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.
I would expect that the Democrats and Republicans are seeing the world (and the media) through blue- and red-tinted glasses. I would expect that the independents are, on average, seeing more clearly.
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 was thinking along the axis of less/more personally biased, not along the axis of less/more informed. While I don't have evidence, I find it very difficult to see how the independents would be more biased.
> I find it very difficult to see how the independents would be more biased.
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".
Seeing only percentages without also relative sizes of each groups makes it hard for me to infer that. If someone identified as independent due to not feeling like there were differences between the parties in the past, maybe the growing divide in worldview of each side caused them to start to see a difference. Put another way, maybe the independents who trust the media found it harder to not pick a side.
>I would expect that the Democrats and Republicans are seeing the world (and the media) through blue- and red-tinted glasses. I would expect that the independents are, on average, seeing more clearly.
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.
Sure, but you could make a similar observation about the sudden Republican drop. Did the media suddenly become less trustworthy and only Republicans figured it out?
That supports my point, not rebuts it. My thesis is that the media shifted to the left, causing Democrats to see them more favorably and Republicans to see them less favorably, and the drop and the gain both indicate that.
I wasn't disagreeing with your thesis so much as pointing out that for both Republicans and Democrats, "trust" is more of a proxy for "does this coverage agree with my politics" (you might be making the same argument). I don't know if you can say it shows a media shift one way or the other though, since one could make a pretty strong argument that Trump was fairly terrible among Republican politicians and the media didn't have to move at all for his coverage to be worse and delight Democrats while angering Republicans.
Totally agree on the meaning of "trust" here, and that's a fair point regarding it not really being conclusive that the media moved left. My own take is that they did, but your explanation is plausible. Strange times.
Somebody asks the right question but if it’s the wrong person asking the right question, it’s now a “conspiracy theory”.
Sometimes the person asking the question is a genuine jackass and sometimes they’re merely of a different partisan persuasion; but if you’re willing to ignore the person and address it, you might find it’s worth checking into anyway.
> Hunter Biden's laptop was dismissed as a hoax but turns out it's legit
Does it? I'm genuinely not up to date here but the Hunter Biden laptop story was all about the supposedly explosive stuff stored on the laptop and I've still not seen any proof of that.
The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the contents were probably legitimate in a story on a related subject. Unsurprisingly, it hasn't been a very high profile story in the mainstream media.
I guess I don’t really understand what you’re looking for here. You’re complaining about a lack of mainstream media coverage then pointing to mainstream media coverage. Typically papers write a follow up story when new facts have emerged, what new facts have emerged?
> Typically papers write a follow up story when new facts have emerged, what new facts have emerged?
Great question. What new facts HAVE emerged that caused the New York Times to change their stance on the provenance of these emails? Seems like a story should have been written about that, right? Unless no new facts did emerge, but that would be even more concerning, wouldn't it? That would mean they were either intentionally misleading people or changing their mind capriciously.
It's bizarre to me the way people treat this as a non-issue. I myself wanted the story to be false because I didn't want it to cost Biden the election. I don't, however, approve of being mislead about things, even if I agree with the goals. This is doubly true for a news organization. It's a failure of their primary responsibility.
edit: even more strange to get downvoted for saying this. I wish some of you who think poorly of what I said would offer a reason. I don't care about the internet points, but I'd like to know what the contrary position actually is.
Jan-Feb 2020 - Masks don't work! don't worry about covid, get a flu shot!
April 2020 - Covid lives on surfaces for 17 days, disinfect all surfaces, also all masks are effective against covid spread(even cloth ones!)
Early 2021 - Vaccines(pfizer, moderna) will stop symptomatic covid with +90% effectiveness, also you have to have a vaccine otherwise you will spread covid to others.
Late 2021 - Oops, cloth masks are not effective against covid(omicron), also vaccines for young children wear off in terms of effectiveness after a few weeks.
I suspect that if the implied interpretation of your observations was the majority view it would negatively affect the public's opinion of science and government agencies rather than the media.
I'm not saying the media is blameless, but this seems like a lot of post-hoc thinking - you're treating the media like they should have known that omicron would exist and so they shouldn't have reported the effectiveness of the vaccines on earlier strains, or reported whatever was the current understood science of the time because things later changed when they didn't know that.
Those are percentages for those who TRUST media, seems matching, though I'm wore surprised by republican percentage, they don't trust even Fox anymore? I guess good for them. Personally I read world news from various sources including BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, etc
I don't think "trust or not", or even level of trust, is a useful question. Almost everyone trusts the media to accurately report the scores of football games. If the media says a hurricane hit Florida, almost everyone trusts that. If the media says Apple released a new iPad today, almost everyone trust that. We have a tendency to pick the most controversial issues and ignore the things everyone agrees on.
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?
> If the media says a hurricane hit Florida, almost everyone trusts that.
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.
Society has changed. While in the past it would take incredible resources (and therefore likely the consent of many people with a college education) to send out a message that reaches large subsets of the population. We now live in a world where one person can write a message that theoretically every single other human on the planet can read.
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.
Yeah you are totally right, this wouldn't work for Twitter, FaceBook, etc. But it would help with the likes of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc, who would all hold broadcasting licenses. It could help to build a core set of news providers that are held to a certain standard in my opinion.
It helped when media was limited so there was only a limited set of channels. If there are 5 quality channels, the lowest quality channel might still have an objectively high quality (as forced to by the fairness doctrine), now there are infinite channels of all qualities.
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.
The fairness doctrine never applied to cable news, never applied to newspapers or magazines, didn't/wouldn't have applied to the Internet, social media, etc. Its importance is routinely overstated.
I think they’re so isolated to particular nyc neighborhoods and to Twitter that they aren’t aware of the level of anger and distrust.
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
>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.
>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.
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.
I would imagine that most aren't aware of how they're perceived. The ones who are aware write it off as the people being stupid, not educated enough, ignorant, etc. That is, the elites in the profession have the awareness but not the humility.
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?
I remember in college English class, I was taught to listen for the authors voice in a nonfiction piece. The problem, is that I don’t want to hear the authors voice in a journalistic piece, I just want the facts. Unfortunately in the media these days, opinions are often spun as facts, and the news item’s author pushes their personal opinion, while framing it as objective journalism. When I realize that reading the news was just reading the opinion of a journalist rather than facts, I gave up on the media.
We have been done a disservice to our country by talking about 3 branches of government and their checks and balances which clearly fail when people choose party over country.
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.
No American should have faith in the media at this point, especially when it comes to geopolitical issues. The Western media uncritically regurgitates U.S. defense and intelligence agency propaganda at every opportunity.
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.
The major news outlets are just mouth pieces for the intelligence communities. Many of us learned that with the Iraq war. Others learned it with Palestine, Russiagate. The rest will learn it soon enough.
I read headlines but that’s it. I don’t watch media commentary on issues. I listen to a lot of podcasts but I don’t actually like listening to activist types and just prefer conversations for the average Joe/Jane/JXe with comedy woven in vs heated passionate argumentation like the world will end if we don’t do x,y,z.
Think asking for a generic question around trust is probably not the right question to ask, and the answers aren't really insightful.
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.
> Think asking for a generic question around trust is probably not the right question to ask, and the answers aren't really insightful.
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.
What is the correlation between distrusting the media and believing that Trump won the election? If that correlation is very high, does this statistic say more about the media or about the public?
For me it's just too much comes off as sensational and emotionally manipulating. My mental health improved quite a lot after I stopped all news consumption in 2015.
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.
> I just pulled up cnn.com as I think most people would agree that's a pretty mainstream/middle of the road outlet
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).
And why would it ever rise? The point of media isn't to give me information, it's to tell me what the rich people, who own the news corporation, wants me to think!
