In a recent poll, 44% of all Americans said that the mainstream media makes up stories out of thin air in order to make President Trump look bad. 24% say the media makes up stories about half of the time. 14% say they make up stories most of the time and 6% say they make up stories all of the time. 31% of respondents say that the media is the enemy of the people. Among Trump supporters only that number jumps to 63%.
Here is something interesting. 25% of all respondents and 42% of Trump voters believe the government should be able to stop news outlets from lying. You would think the numbers would be much higher, especially CNN and the New York Times along with the WaPo. If there were fines for printing fake stories, they would all be bankrupt.
Seventy-four percent of Democratic or Democrat-leaning respondents express “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the news media. During the presidential race, Democratic confidence in the media sat at just over 50 percent — its lowest point in decades.
Republican confidence in the media, meanwhile, has continued its decades-long decline and currently sits at 19 percent.
Overall, 49 percent of all Americans express “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the press, nearly the same as the 50 percent who say they have “only some” or “hardly any” trust in the media.
Despite the fact that confidence in the media is slightly up this year, 69 percent of Americans still say the media “tend to favor one side” in political coverage.
At the inaugural Poynter Journalism Ethics Summit earlier this month, Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said increased trust in the media is a “double-edged sword” because it’s being driven mostly by partisan polarization.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said:
“We’ve seen these dynamics occur on issues with scientists, and their perception is being affiliated with the Democratic Party, and that really harms scientific credibility in the public debate.”
“If journalists go down that the same road and become seen as part of the Democratic [Party] coalition, I think it’s very harmful to the ability of all you to do your jobs and to create this reasonably broad, shared consensus about the nature of reality that we’d like to hope is a mission of journalism.”
They media in this country will crash and burn. I won’t miss them a bit.
