Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in US (gallup.com)
- Reference: 0179630714
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/02/1612223/trust-in-media-at-new-low-of-28-in-us
- Source link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx
> This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago. Meanwhile, seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have "not very much" confidence (36%) or "none at all" (34%). When Gallup began measuring trust in the news media in the 1970s, between 68% and 72% of Americans expressed confidence in reporting. However, by the next reading in 1997, public confidence had fallen to 53%. Media trust remained just above 50% until it dropped to 44% in 2004, and it has not risen to the majority level since. The highest reading in the past decade was 45% in 2018, which came just two years after confidence had collapsed amid the divisive 2016 presidential campaign.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx
In other news (Score:1)
Water is wet
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> Water is wet
You sheeple will believe anything.
Re: In other news (Score:2)
Not sure why you're whinging. You sound like you qualify in at least one DEI category.
MAGA was successful (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole intent of the "fake news" agenda was to make people only listen to a single voice. Now the FCC is making sure everyone is singing the same tune.
Re:MAGA was successful (Score:5, Insightful)
> Boy I sure am glad this is entirely the fault of my political enemies, and my side bears no responsibility whatsoever for the current state of things.
Re: MAGA was successful (Score:2)
From this side of the Atlantic I really don't see the equivalence between your 2 parties.
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That's because "both sides are bad" is an escape hatch that gets one out of the uncomfortable position of having to critically evaluate the two.
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The complaining about both sides being bad argument is an escape hatch for having to deal with their own hypocrisy.
"first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye"
Both sides are bad, awful really every sneaky underhanded anti-democratic act you can accuse a politically important member of either major party, someone of relatively equal importance in the other party has done the same and recently! You either choose to not see or you consume
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Well one is fascist and the other isn't, which should be a major thing even someone far removed from it and used to just comparing political parties to some crude "mid point" between your two dominant parties should be able to notice.
I mean seriously, this "both sides are the same" shit needs to stop. The Democrats are obnoxiously corporate, sure, but they're not trying to roll back protections for marginalized groups, they're not trying to dismantle democracy, they're not building concentration camps, and
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Boy I sure am glad that people on the Internet are intellectually lazy and want to reach for "bothsides" as a way to not put accountability where it belongs.
Hint: While examples of "both sides" can be seen if you dig enough, and use powerful enough microscopes; one particular party doesn't involve any digging at all, and the only way you couldn't see it is if you were blind or willfully looking elsewhere.
TL;DR: while "both sides" may have some share of the blame, it's absolutely not an equal share. Stop pr
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> The whole intent of the "fake news" agenda was to make people only listen to a single voice.
This is absolute bullshit. There is no "single voice" on the right and even MAGA does not agree on everything. Remember recent almost-war with Iran? Tucker and Bannon pulled us out of it. Remember Elon wanting more H-1B? Remember Ben Shapiro getting ostracized over asking for affirmative action for Jews and censorship of pro-Palestine voices? etc. etc.
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MAGA agrees with Trump in lock step. You get some fringe politicians here and there like Rand Paul or someone whose term is finished but you’ll never see the house speaker disagree. Look how many people who were tossed aside the second they became of no use by the party.
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This might be your view from the outside. The reality is that MAGA, just like any other political movement, is a broad coalition of various special and broad interest groups that do not agree with each other on a number of topics. Broadly speaking, it is a coalition of socially conservatives, anti-war and trade isolationists, big business, neocon war hawks, etc. About the only thing everyone agrees is disdain for Woke, where everything else has pro and against coalitions.
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Some of those "Fringe" right-wingers like Rand Paul were already morons. Rand Paul is the "gold is money" guy. It's not, and has never been in modern history, but it was put out of commission BY the right-wing Nixon Republican party, and the rest of the world followed suit. Now gold is just an asset that people run to like lemmings every time the value of their country's dollar sinks, and people get duped into buying gold-plated lead.
Like the least stupid right-wing politicians have always been the ones in
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> MAGA agrees with Trump in lock step.
Really ...
[1]It's Not Just Epstein. MAGA Is Angry About a Lot of Things [wired.com]
I don't know who you're talking to, but while they're generally happy with him, Trump supporters call him out fairly frequently when they think he's getting squishy on something. They were mad at him for the Syrian involvement in the first term, and in just the last few months they've been unhappy about both the strike on Iran and his flip on the Ukraine war, both of which they maintain we shouldn't be involved in at all. There was criticis
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-list-maga-angry-trump
Re:MAGA was successful (Score:4, Interesting)
> even MAGA does not agree on everything
MAGA is a party/movement of exclusion, based on if one is MAGA enough and an ever narrowing definition of that. Anyone who doesn't agree with the current definition too hard and/or for too long won't be MAGA anymore. Trump easily discards even very loyal people if they don't conform; he may take you back if you have something he wants/needs, but he won't ever forget your transgression -- for as long as he can actually remember things anyway. Current toadies will be happy to remind him, though perhaps not entirely accurately. His brain operates on a LIFO model.
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> Anyone who doesn't agree with the current definition too hard and/or for too long won't be MAGA anymore
This is demonstrably wrong. Bannon and Tucker very publicly disagreed with Trump on Iran and are still core MAGA. That is, Trump had to concede to the base that held him accountable to anti-war electoral promise. There were credible threats of third-party runs and projected midterm losses for Trump (likely resulting in Democrat-led impeachment).
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The single voice on the right is Trump's voice, because every GOP elected politician is scared to death of him endorsing a primary challenger that is even more cowardly and depraved than they are.
The rest is noise. As soon as Trump gives them an opinion, they'll all change their tune and start singing 4-part harmony, just like with every other thing in the last 10 years.
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Yeah the Nazis had a lot of different ideas too.
A gradual game of musical chairs where eventually only the right ideas get a seat at the table.
Re:MAGA was successful (Score:4, Insightful)
> The whole intent of the "fake news" agenda was to make people only listen to a single voice. Now the FCC is making sure everyone is singing the same tune.
The people who fervently believed in either the right or the left have always believed their faves were right and the opposition was wrong. The fake news push was aimed at the uncommitted middle and introducing doubt in their minds so that they had no point of reference for what even the facts were, rendering them even more susceptible to manipulation.
The availability of a single voice is a Trump second term thing. Outright canceling of universities, companies, and people. There used to be a timidity about looking like a tyrant, but that timidity is gone. With that timidity erased, the canceling is now open and directly aimed at media and even at late night talk shows. The attack on the Constitution continues.
One of the reasons that the timidity is gone is that the Trumpers have strategically eliminated all moderate Republican voices so that there is now no internal opposition. These former “voices of reason" have retreated and are now just silently shaking their heads. There is no possibility of rolling back this continued attack on the Constitution, at least until 2028, and we'll see what happens then. The US electoral system is unfortunately very easy to manipulate.
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The fact that "fake news" worked is just a symptom of the problem, not the root cause.
The root cause is that the internet - over 30 years or so - has steadily forced news outlets to come out with stories that within shorter and shorter amount of time. As geeks, we all know that you can have fast, good or cheap, pick two. The same applies to journalism. But the problem is that fast is a hard requirement now - and journalism isn't a high-margin business so cheap is as well. That tosses out good. (And of cours
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While Trump leveraged distrust of the mainstream media, he didn't initiate that distrust. It was developing for decades before he came along.
Most of the news outlets *earned* that distrust, by fixating on 1) drama and 2) political correctness. Fox News started out trying to go for "We report, you decide," but that tagline is long gone. Now they're as slanted on the right, as MSNBC on the left. Even NPR's reporting, with its high standard of journalism, finds itself left-of-center. [1]https://www.allsides.com/m [allsides.com]
[1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
Re: MAGA was successful (Score:2)
Slanted?! Fox "News" is fucking horizontal.
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I don't disagree. And so is MSNBC.
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Even NPR's reporting, with its high standard of journalism, finds itself left-of-center
Well reality has a well known liberal bias which is why MAGA types trust fox news over reality.
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> reality has a well known liberal bias
Said Stephen Colbert, a man with a well-known liberal bias. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/?titl... [wikipedia.org]
Sure, MAGA movement is detached from reality. But liberalism has its own problems with reality. For example, pretending that the X and Y chromosomes mean nothing, only what you feel about yourself. And, both parties have a problem with imagining that money grows on trees, as we've seen the deficit climb regardless of which party is in power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_liberal_bias&redirect=no
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> For example, pretending that the X and Y chromosomes mean nothing,
Reductio ad absurdum.
Literally nobody except you has claimed that.
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Nobody? Here are some sources...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[2]https://www.thetrevorproject.o... [thetrevorproject.org]
[3]https://www.medicalnewstoday.c... [medicalnewstoday.com]
[4]https://www.law.cornell.edu/we... [cornell.edu]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity
[2] https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/article/understanding-gender-identities-and-pronouns/
[3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/types-of-gender-identity
[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/gender_identity
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So you admit you're lying?
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> Even NPR's reporting, with its high standard of journalism, finds itself left-of-center.
This is what happens when the overton window shift so far in such a short amount of time - organizations that stay exactly where they are appear to move left, because the window has shifted so far rightward.
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Most media is owned by the rich and powerful who benefit from Trump. They do nothing but sanewash his outlandish lies or call out anything illegal that he does. He spews literal gibberish [1]https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com] and it’s crickets chirping.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-sentence/
They're basically is a single voice (Score:5, Insightful)
We've had decades of Media consolidation. Every time a left of center media outlet starts to get some traction a right-wing billionaire swoops in and buys it.
I remember The Hill started to get really popular. Slightly left of center content all over the place. Then all of a sudden it started a hard right turn. It didn't make a hell of a lot of sense until I looked it up and sure enough a billionaire owned media outlet bought them out and fired everyone.
Sooner or later everybody goes through tough times and if you want spewing propaganda from the wealthiest people on the planet then there's a high probability you're going to run out of cash.
When that happens you are the go out of business and go away or you let yourself get bought out hoping to maintain editorial control and naturally you lose it.
When the left wing blathers on about wealth inequality this is the problem we're talking about. The real problem isn't the inequality it's the enormous amount of power we've given approximately 1,000 people. They can basically tell you what to do and if you don't do it they can crush you like an ant.
Unfortunately the left wing sucks at messaging and they are ridiculously conservative when it comes to changing messaging and tactics so they are still operating like it's the 60s and there's a huge number of Black folk fighting for equality and white folk fighting with them.
The problem right now isn't equality the problem is we have this tiny group of people with way the fuck too much power who can order us around. But the left wing is still hung up on equality.
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Political parties have become tribes, and now at least half of the country has lost the capacity for being critical of their own. I don't see how this gets reconciled peacefully, let alone amicably.
28% (Score:2)
Surprising, had to be a fixed survey to get that high.
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dunno. the impression i get from this very forum msm is still very much the gospel for way more than 28%. but, wait ... wtf ... has someone just farted?
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also, this is about us msm. it seems us population is finally awakening. in the eu we're still merrily sleepwalking our way to the abyss.
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NPR would be very surprised to hear that. Or laughing their collective ass off.
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He banned the Associated Press because they don’t kiss his ass. [1]https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24... [npr.org]
You’d have stroked out if Obama banned Fox from the white house.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5307243/ap-trump-lawsuit-gulf-of-america-mexico
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Given what's happened since 2016, largely as a result of the extreme right wing media's lying since the 1990s, I think it was the wrong call not to kick out Fox News. It would have upset the establishment, but let's be quite honest, the country is at an end, the constitution isn't worth shit, human rights abuses are now mainstreamed, and much of this is due to the malign influence of a single Australian media baron, and the unwillingness of the Democrats to fight back or the establishment to recognize what'
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Gee, why do you think they're trying to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from the federal budget?
You don't think that NPR's continued reporting of easily observable reality, especially when it doesn't mesh with what the administration is saying, might be related?
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Yes. The major news outlets are very pro-Trump. Absolutely. Never any criticism of trump in the media. Sure.
2 Rules for "trust" of MSM (Score:2, Flamebait)
Rule #1: when the entire MSM machine fires up and suddenly starts pushing the same narrative very aggressively in lockstep with each other, you can take it to the bank that not only is that narrative FALSE but also likely very harmful to you.
Rule #2: when the MSM âoefact-checkersâ and censorship machine fires up into overdrive to suddenly try to debunk or censor some topic, you can bet the house that whatever that topic happens to be is directly over the target.
Symptom of a larger issue (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just distrust of media, or just the blind willingness to delegate our opinions to the loudest voice in the room. We don't trust anything anymore and that's a real problem. Plenty of people would rather trust random idiits than people educated in a field.
We're not on the same page, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. And that makes it really hard for a society to function.
It sucks. But here we are.
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> We're not on the same page, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. And that makes it really hard for a society to function.
So you don't think diversity is strength anymore? Or only if it diverse from political opinions you personally approve?
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> So you don't think diversity is strength anymore? Or only if it diverse from political opinions you personally approve?
Diversity was NEVER our strength... UNITY was our strength. The United States was supposed to be a melting pot . Diverse peoples coming together and uniting as AMERICANS . Diversity was simply the ingredient.. The finished product was supposed to be people who viewed themselves, first and foremost, as American citizens, no matter where they came from.
There are few things that piss me off as much as some cunt flying the flag of the shit-hole he/she left to come here.
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Diversity and unity are orthogonal. Diversity always has been a strength, a monoculture is a shitty way to live.
Nobody sane wants to live in an environment where everyone is like them.
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The real problem is those who were trusted have betrayed that trust. Horribly, blatantly, and continually.
If I cheat on my wife and lie about it for years, then she finds out and files for divorce, the problem isn't her lack of trust in the marriage.
Not just news organizations (Score:3)
It's not just news organizations. Trust in all institutions has been falling for a while. That includes things like the CDC, police services, and even global organizations like the WHO, etc. In my opinion the organizations partly brought this on themselves. A good example is that during the pandemic there was a very public discussion that was had about what messaging to give to the public. The idea was that the public isn't smart enough to understand that N95 masks are very good, cloth masks perform quite poorly, and surgical masks are somewhere in between. The confounding factor was that we didn't have enough N95 and even surgical masks. News organizations reported on lists of "42 studies" that showed the effectiveness of masks. Yeah, I actually went and looked at those studies and all the evidence was very weak in terms of supporting *cloth* masks. But here's the thing... they had this discussion about what the tell the public in full view of the public, as if we weren't listening. You can't do that and maintain trust. The only discussion you can have in full view of the public is "what should we tell everyone? THE TRUTH!" Manipulating your message to control behavior instead of just to inform is a really bad idea. We can all see the media and other institutions doing it constantly now and we're sick of it.
Fact checking and bias (Score:2)
Even when the media gets the facts correct, they tell me how to think about it. I'm not counting fox news which is entertainment. I'm talking about the WSJ, CNN or CBC (canada). They all have a left wing opinion. CBC is the worst. Poor person does something stupid we have to bail them out. Landlords, corporations, insurance companies, banks, capitalism always bad.
It is now easier than ever to fact check an article. In the 90s my economics prof gave us a 1% bonus for each article that we submitted
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Academia has transitioned Journalism into Activism. The Media is just the playing field for the activist.
It's not the media that's the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
It's social media that is the media and they only want to weaponize all media to make people more polarized so they will be more engaged and make them more money. The biggest problem is there is no gatekeepers or editors. Pre 2000's media was sanitized and editied, now any idiot can reach the world, even media organizations that tell lies.
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My thinking as well. Once monetization of social media was perfected all of the "silent" voices could now be heard. Unfortunately, many of those voices were partisan hacks. We may never know for certain if Walter Cronkite was a decent person but he did attempt to be a gatekeeper for news, maybe even things that matter.
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> My thinking as well. Once monetization of social media was perfected all of the "silent" voices could now be heard. Unfortunately, many of those voices were partisan hacks.
s/many/nearly all/
It turns out that when advertising is free, the worst elements of society that provide the least benefit to society take advantage of it to bad ends.
> We may never know for certain if Walter Cronkite was a decent person but he did attempt to be a gatekeeper for news, maybe even things that matter.
Wish I had met him, but sadly, I didn't, so I can't say. I did meet Sam Donaldson (who overlapped with him at a different network) and Katie Couric (who missed overlapping by only a few years at the other major network), and they seemed like decent people. I'd imagine Cronkite was as well. Most of the journos back then were.
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Walter Cronkite was a big fat idiot. You heard it here first. :)
Thank Project 2025 (Score:2, Insightful)
They've been pushing this narrative that media can't be trusted. This then allows them to shape stories to fit their own right-wing agenda. Witness for the past 5 years all the whining about a "stolen" election. Almost every day for Biden's term that fake story was pushed out, mainly by their stooge Trump, but definitely put out there on other sites and roundly repeated by the dullard MAGA crowd.
Never mind that the Fox tabloid jumped wholeheartedly on this bandwagon and got bitchslapped [1]for almost $8 [forbes.com]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/04/18/fox-news-settles-dominion-defamation-case-for-7875-million-dominion-lawyer-says/
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But when the media said we definitely needed to invade Iraq, they were 100% telling the truth. When they said Joe Biden was 100% fine, they were definitely telling the truth. When they uncritically regurgitate whatever they are told by politicians and spies, they are doing their job exactly right. When a large news outlet declares that they are no longer going to even try and be objective because they know what's right, and then list as "right" their positions on all of the most contentious political que
Badly designed survey (Score:3)
This survey is meaningless. You don't ask a general summary question ("How much do you trust the media?") and report the result. You ask specific, neutral questions ("What is your level of trust or distrust of the NY Times on topic X?" "What is your level of trust or distrust of Fox News on topic Y?") and then aggregate the data to produce a summary answer. That is Survey Making 101.
All general summary questions are invalid, period.
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> All general summary questions are invalid, period.
Do you have a survey to prove this?
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>> All general summary questions are invalid, period.
> Do you have a survey to prove this?
"Invalid" isn't a proper characterization. "Useless" is the word I'd choose. The question isn't specific enough to have any meaning beyond gauging someone's general feelings. There's nothing to take action on with that information.
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While you have a point, I don't think the result is totally meaningless.
I do distrust different sources to different degrees, and on different subjects.
I personally rank Fox News and MSNBC as the most slanted (in opposite directions). CNN somewhat less slanted, but still pretty lopsided. NPR more towards the middle, but still gives different treatment to the different political points of view. There's a pretty good analysis here: [1]https://www.allsides.com/media... [allsides.com] Though I don't agree with their "Center" rat
[1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
Re: For all the wrong reasons. (Score:1)
Yes, communism will save us.
Idiot.
"Fair and Balanced" (Score:2)
Fox News started this idea that political reporting always needs to treat both sides of an issue as equally valid, regardless of how closely either side adheres to facts and and good-faith arguments.
"Fair and Balanced" as it has become would demand equal time for Jews and Nazis in a piece about the Holocaust.
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No actual mainstream press outlet has taken any of those positions, so as usual, you're just making things up so you have something to be angry about.
A somewhat longer view (Score:2)
In a song from the early 1950's ("The Roving Kind") a man being a politician is used to justify the claim that he's a "good and righteous man". (But that may be a hang-over as it's a rewrite of a song from much earlier that I don't know.)
It's all about the ad revenue (Score:2)
News outlets will do anything to keep the eyeballs fixed so advertising revenue keeps flowing. If that means aligning with certain political groups so be it. The Internet has only pushed their ad revenue seeking ways even further down the rabbit hole. When news casters started acting like talk show hosts and spewing their opinions is when "journalism" died. I'm old enough to remember the likes of Walter Cronkite telling the news like it was. I want the news of current events, not some stupid talking head te
That's generous. (Score:2)
Many people don't trust them at all.
Gee why? (Score:3)
Gee Santa, why don't people trust journalists any more?
NYT Editor, in an interview on NPR in June 2016: "We have to set aside journalistic objectivity sometimes [the context was about Trump's run for office and how to defeat him]"
No, you really don't.
You're a reporter. You can report the news without interpreting; if it's honestly reported and awful, trust your readers to understand it and draw their conclusions. Your CURRENCY as a reporter is your holding yourself separate from the news you're reporting.
When the national paper of record goes ON RECORD to say that they are picking sides in a political contest, they have forfeited their claim on credibility. They have stated openly that political bias > honesty.
I checked out 7 years ago (Score:1)
I stopped having any faith in the reliability of media, entirely, about 7 years ago. To me, there is no such thing as 'credible sources' on the internet, there are simply sources and information to consider. This is the reality most people are going to have to face over the next 5 years, that there's very. very good reason not to trust what you currently believe is a trusted source - as your mind is what's of interest to them, not presenting reliable information.
Conversely, what _do_ people trust? (Score:2)
I haven't thought news on the big 4 networks was particularly fair or comprehensive for decades. IMHO, it's very constrained by time, viewer attention, placating advertisers, organizational priors, and "if it bleeds, it leads". I haven't seen a story which I thought told the whole picture for a long time.
But given that, what I wonder is where do people think they get their current events news? Facebook? TikTok? Podcasts? TV? Radio? Church? Moe's bar? I know a lot of people just don't care about current even
The Trump Rorschach test effect (Score:2)
Whether you love Trump or Despise him, the simple fact is that his presence in the political arena broke the brains of a lot of people and the results have produced a number of spin-off effects. Some people see Trump and see a patriotic successful businessman, others see him as a rude, ignorant, uncultured fascist. People in this latter category, discarded all traditions in a reaction to him, seeing themselves as defenders of civilization and their every action as justified. People who supported Trump saw t
Re: (Score:3)
> No one trusts the media. They lied about Covid (Chinese bio-weapon), lied about it's threat-level. (It was relatively harmless). Campaigned to lock us down for the harmless virus. Campaigned to keep us locked down. Campaigned to force mRNA experimental Genetically Engeered substances into people's bodies. Note, these are not "vaccines" by the original definition, and they cure NOTHING. The press are just LEFT WING propagandists, aka Liars. They also tried to tell us Biden was doing a great job, and Kamala Harris could run the country. Then you have endless Trump Derangement Syndrome, the same as the Score-5 brainwashed woke indoctrinated groupthink gaylords on Slashdot. The Media also cheers on those who laughted at the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, and tried to blame it on the "Far Right". So, do we trust the Media? Do we heck. The Media are LIARS.
The fact that part of what is ostensibly mainstream media spews stuff that would lead to a post like this is exactly why trust in the media is at an all-time low.
Back in the 80s and before, journalists actually had to take the time to learn enough about their stories to sound intelligent. And that meant that when they interviewed a talking head in politics, if the politician lied, the journalist would often correct them.
In the post-news era, we started seeing more and more talking head "news", where news c
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> What do I blame for this? Two things.
I would pick two different things: 1) The mere existence of 24-hour news-entertainment channels, a-la Fox News, CNBC, etc. 2) The people that consume the product from point #1, and conflate it with "journalism".
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>> What do I blame for this? Two things.
> I would pick two different things: 1) The mere existence of 24-hour news-entertainment channels, a-la Fox News, CNBC, etc. 2) The people that consume the product from point #1, and conflate it with "journalism".
Well, one of those is basically the same as one of mine, to be fair. IMO, it's not 24-hour aspect that's the problem. It's the entertainment aspect. CNN was founded in 1980, and Headline News was founded in 1982. The quality of news/journalism didn't really start to decline rapidly until the late 1990s, and it cratered by the mid-2000s.
Before Fox News, CNN was the only 24-hour news source. It had no competition, so it had no incentive to spin the news and sensationalize it to get viewers. If you wante
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> Well, one of those is basically the same as one of mine, to be fair.
I'd say similar, yes. But the differentiation, from my perspective, is that I don't exclusively blame Fox. CNN may have not existed in their current form prior to Fox, but they are absolutely currently equivalent in my mind.
> The quality of news/journalism didn't really start to decline rapidly until the late 1990s, and it cratered by the mid-2000s.
I was too young and stupid to pay attention to the news prior to the mid-2000s. Our current dumpster-fire state of news-as-news-entertainment is the only way I've known the 24-hour TV networks.
Re: (Score:2)
CNN was probably the beginning of the end. My wife is a journalist who knew other journalists... one of whom was in Ethiopia in the 1980s as part of a set of international journalists. The CNN crew set up a fake scene of parents mourning their babies. The babies were real, it is just that the scene was moved (yes, they moved dead babies and presumably paid the parents) so it looked better on camera. (I likely have some details a little wrong, but the gist of the story is correct - and no, this cannot be con
Re: (Score:2)
Is it fair to blame Fox for what was already happening? Or complain that it was intentionally biased in the opposite direction from that which the other outlets were intentionally biased?
I'd say this began long before Fox news. I'd say it began before CNN. I'll put the blame square on TV anchors in the 1970' and 80's. For one, Fox News would not exist had Koppel, Kronkite, Donaldson, and whazzisface not demonstrated such strong biases and dishonesty. Fox was a reaction to them, not something that eme
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think I'll hold the initial panic against them. Just the stuff afterwards, when they should have, and may have, known better.
Re: Media = PRAVDA - LEFT WING propaganda (Score:2)
> They lied about Covid (Chinese bio-weapon), lied about it's threat-level. (It was relatively harmless).
COVID is simultaneously a bioweapon and relatively harmless?
Do you even hear yourself?
But they trust the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Also whatever the "wise" AIs tell them. Time for some rage against the AI machines?
Unfortunately, I think most people are so into oracles that they will just learn to limit their thinking to the kinds of questions where the AI answers seem most useful. Especially for recommended cat videos.
Solution approach/Funny time:
Media can regain trust with more AI-generated cat videos!
Re:But they trust the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Two words: Fox News. They're trustworthy? Yeah right.
I used to trust the Washington Post but they've made so many exaggerations and just plain errors in the last 5 years, and their censorship in the comments section has gone nuts. Earlier this year I canceled my subscription.
Re: But they trust the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fox entertainment, they report on news AND opinion. When they do both in the same hour, viewers can't tell the difference.
Re: But they trust the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Fox's own lawyers argued in court that you shouldn't believe what they broadcast. [1]https://law.justia.com/cases/f... [justia.com]
"Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
Re: But they trust the Internet (Score:2)
Sure, and Subway never thought that people would eat a footlong in one sitting.
Re: (Score:2)
This is known in the business as the [1]Maddow Defense [cernovich.com].
[1] https://www.cernovich.com/rachel-maddow-oann-lawsuit/
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... I think it's an interesting question as to whether FAUX should be allowed to brand itself as news. They do want to sell advertising, but I think that's for credibility and their real business model is different. They can have as much money as they need under the table as long as they put out the "news" they are being paid for... Truth in advertising has become a rather sad joke, too.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah.
The problem is media consolidation. When newspapers, radio stations, and television stations were independent, they were reliable to tell news without investors and shareholders pulling the strings.
Meanwhile the internet commentators aren't generally incentivized by investors except those on the kremlin's payroll like Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and Tim Pool.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366266/dl
Not saying these people "knew", but they should have known better.
Re: (Score:2)
The whole idea of news for profit rather than to inform the public may be the root of the evil? When the REAL goal is to attract eyeballs for advertisers, the value of truth becomes dubious...
So we should blame "60 Minutes" because it was the first profitable news program? But that was built on the Golden Age of Journalism fantasy when frequency-based monopolies were auctioned off subject to the constraint of providing specified amounts of news as a public service. Or more blame to CNN for trying to do it o