Pandemic of mistrust: New media study claims public is to blame for lack of faith in media
Co-sponsored by The Associated Press, the study makes the ridiculous claim the public "lacks the sophistication" to understand and recognize good journalism
One comment multiple respondents made in the survey was that, with an increasing number of media options, they should be able to find one they trust. Yet the vast majority said it is all but impossible. (Photo Illustration: BBC Graphics)
Americans trust in the media fell to an all-time low this year.
But that has nothing to do with the quality of media coverage, according to a new — media sponsored, of course — study. No, the problem is us.
The study illogically concludes most Americans “lack the sophistication” to appreaciate what journalism is and are therefore unable embrace it’s core values.
The arrogantly self-described “major study,” co-sponsored by the world’s largest news organization, found that most Americans want the facts — they just don’t want reporters’ spin. It also found most disagree with legacy media’s insistence on defining the nation’s problems for consumers.
“When journalists say they are just doing their jobs, in other words, the problem is many people harbor doubts about what the job should be,” said the American Press Institute, which partnered with The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research for the survey.
The corporations founded The Media Insight Project, which they say will be an ongoing research endeavor. Regarding it’s first study, Media Insight said the vast majority of U.S. citizens agree with only one of the five pillars it considers foundational for journalists: 67 percent of Americans endorsed factualism, the idea that the more facts people have, the closer they will get to the truth.
Only one other value — “giving voice to the less powerful” — received support from just half of the American people. The other half said that journalists’ skewing stories to “amplify the voices of people who aren’t ordinarily heard” is overrated, overhyped and overdone, that such news coverage isn’t relevant to most readers and viewers while at the same tiime failing to help the people featured.
Readers overwhelmingly rejected the meda’s single-minded focus on America’s alleged faults, defects, and deficiencies, something the study labeled “social criticism.” The study found that the public offers the least support for this idea, which claims that a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems. Only 29 percent agree.
Readers also said the media spend too much time attacking those in authority, and they should put national security ahead of transparency. Many respondents said that there are numerous instances when all details — such as classified information — cannot and should not be released. Without the right context, those surveyed said, such reports can hinder progress and leave room for gross misinterpretation.
Just more than one-tenth of Americans share the same worldview of the vast majority of legacy media reporters and would prefer so-called “journalists” would just report the facts. (Photo: Anthony Bolante/Reuters)
Only about one in 10 Americans support all five values that guide story selection and framing of the Associated Press.
“While journalists may consider the five journalism values we identified as universal,” the study said, only 11 percent of the American people share the reporters’ worldview.
Not surprisingly, the legacy media’s least critical consumers tended to be overwhelmingly on the Left. Democrats make up more than three out of four (78 percent) of the people the survey dubs “journalism supporters” and of those, 62 percent described themselves as liberals.
The survey confirms what most Americans have observed for years: Legacy media journalists’ core constituency is well outside the mainstream. Most readers know specific reporters’ coverage biases very well — and they don’t like or trust them.
The largest group of Americans “consumed a lot of news, but at the same time they were fairly suspicious of the news media,” the survey reported. Interestingly, media consumers holding to that practice and that viewpoint make up 35 percent of the population and only half of these people were Republicans.
“This is a group that the news media is reaching but to a large degree failing to earn their trust,” the Media Project noted.
The survey’s conclusions echo numerous other studies over the years. A 2020 Gallup poll found that 81 percent of Americans consider a functional news media “critical” or “very important” for sustaining a healthy government. But 83 percent said that nearly all media coverage is biased and that the media drive major divisions among Americans.
A 2018 survey by The American Press Institute — one of the entities involved in the current survey — found even lower numbers. According to that study, only six percent of Americans expressed any trust in the legacy media. A survey of more than 2,000 adults released then showed that trust in the media had dipped to dramatically low levels, with about 52 percent of respondents reporting they had “some confidence” in media while 41 percent said they have “hardly any confidence at all.”
The Media Project’s survey is a tortured way of refusing to state the obvious: The legacy media are out of step with the vast majority of the American people. Their reporters’ values align with fewer than one out of every five readers — and they are almost exclusively on the Fascist Left of the political spectrum. Instead of changing the way they cover the news, legacy media outlets blame the fact-starved public, making the absurd claim the public lacks the sophistication to understand what the media claims is “journalism.”
CNN’’s Jim Acosta blatantly displayed anti-Trump rhetoric will covering the 45th president at the White House. That is one example of the kind of bias the American public would like reporters to drop from their efforts at news coverage. (Photo: Shyla Davies/CNN)
There is some variation in media perception based on political affiliation, yet they most agree Americans believe electronic and print media have a responsibility to live up to their critical role in preserving democracy. Fewer than one-quarter of survey respondents believe there is at least one objective news source.
That should not be surprising, given the media repeats nearly verbatim every lie Joe Biden tells, dating well back to his 2020 campaign.
For example, candidate Biden announced his campaign with the “Charlottesville Lie:” The claim that President Trump was referring to Nazis and White supremacists when he said there were “very fine people, on both sides.” In reality, President Trump was referring to people on both sides of the debate about removing the Robert E. Lee statue. The media has to this day refused to acknowledge that massive untruth.
An entire set of lies media has helped Biden perpetuate regards Georgia’s secure elections law passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) in April. Immediately after the signing, Biden made a statement in which every allegation is untrue. The new law does not end voting hours early, end early voting, place restrictions on casting absentee ballots that deny “countless voters” the right to vote, reduce the number of polling sites, or criminalize providing water to voters waiting in line.
That brings us to Biden’s unbelievably false comments in his so-called Speech to the Joint Sessions of Congress in which he said, “We won’t ignore what our intelligence agency has determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today: White supremacy’s terrorism.”
Along with almost all Americans, I condemn white supremacist and anti-Muslim groups as well as the crimes they commit. We at America’s Conservative Voice (ACV) loudly condemn all hate groups, all criminal and destructive behavior.
Biden’s statement, however, is designed to manipulate people’s emotions and understanding. The media eagerly lapped it up and rebroadcast it nearly 300 times over the three days following the address.
Let me say that Biden’s statement is literally true — only to the extent that America’s intelligence agencies claim that White supremacy is a problem. The major question that arises from those assertions is how the agencies have arrived at that false conclusion, what alleged facts they used to arrive at an erroneous assumption.
Another Biden lie legacy media has continued to promote came from the presidential debates last fall, during which Biden claimed Trump had never condemned white supremacy. (Photo: YouTube Screen Capture)
The remark insinuated into the minds of millions of Americans the suggestion that White supremacists are killing vast numbers of Americans, which is patently false. Statistics indicate this is not true. Biden’s behavior as a candidate and in the Oval Office has not indicated he is anything but a bald-faced liar, and we now recognize the legacy media is totally complicit in promoting those lies.
Politics is not the only thing the media has lied about to destroy public trust in news outlets’ ability to be objective and honest. The most memorable such lie was NBC’s efforts in 1992 to prove Chevy trucks were unsafe, the gas tanks likely to explode when a truck was involved in a rear-end collision.
They ran into a problem: There was no real evidence the allegation was true. So they rigged the truck to explode by altering the gas cap and placing an incediary device under their truck. It took two years for NBC to admit they lied.
Then there was the Rolling Stone fiasco in which an article, published online in November 2014, detailed a brutal gang rape of a University of Virginia student named "Jackie" at one of the school's fraternity houses. The article sparked outrage and prompted the president of the university to suspend all fraternatities for the rest of the semester.
The story was a complete fraud. The magazine retracted the debunked story about the sexual assault that supposedly took place at the Phi Kappa Psi house following an independent report found in January 2015 that concluded the magazine had been hoodwinked by an inveterate liar and the reporter, stating the article violated "basic, even routine journalistic practice."
The legacy media has been deeply involved in destroying journalism for nearly six decades, starting with the surprising failure of one of the most respected televisions journalists, Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News.
He declared, after spending a mere 10 days in Vietnam immediately following the Tet Offensive — which the U.S. repelled — that the war “is to end in a stalemate.” Cronkite had absolutely no evidence to support that claim. Moreover, it would have required his spending months in the jungle to gather such evidence.
Cronkite completely ignored the fact the U.S. was winning the war at the time, and was in a position to win right up to the moment Richard Nixon decided to end the war just as North Vietnam was ready to surrender. Thus began the slippery slope for U.S. news media that continues today, though it is obviously nearly the absolute bottom.
Blaming the “lack of sophistication” of the viewing and reading public for mistrust they hold for the media is just another media lie. Most Americans are awakening to the fact that legacy media, for the most part, is nothing more than state-run propaganda for the Fascist Democrats.
Eventually, they will pay for their lies, dishonesty and fake news — and perhaps change their ways. Until that time, keep a several large grains of salt next to your computer and television remote. You’re going to need them.