11 ms·

Americans' Trust in Media Remains Near Record Low

70 points by qclibre22 4y ago

electric_mayhem 4y ago
I don’t believe any of this, not even for a second.
hunglee2 4y ago
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
- goodpoint 4y ago
  The problem is that many are replacing unreliable mass media with even more unreliable facebook and alex jones.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    No one trusts the media except for all the media they trust.
    - trelane 4y ago
      Yep. I'd really like to see this broken down by vendor. I'm not convinced those trusting Dems are counting Fox News as "the media" for instance.
    - deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
      “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.
      - HKH2 4y ago
        > There are many media outlets that specialize in selling the reality that a large enough population wishes to be true. Which ones don't do that? It's hard to find journalists who are not activists, or at the very least do not toe the line.
      - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    - hnuser847 4y ago
      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.
  - hunglee2 4y ago
    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
    - lamename 4y ago
      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.
      - hunglee2 4y ago
        yes you might be right.
    - ManuelKiessling 4y ago
      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. More skeptical, my ass.
      - spacemadness 4y ago
        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.
        goodpoint 4y ago
        It's usually perceived control + sense of superiority + confirmation of existing bias.
    - 4y ago
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  > 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.
  - fcsp 4y ago
    There are a few [Citation needed] in here from my point of view
    - amadeuspagel 4y ago
      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. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
      - fcsp 4y ago
        > 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.
        klipklop 4y ago
        >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.
- asdff 4y ago
  Don't give them too much credit, they aren't reading Chomskey by and large or else you'd see a revolution.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, 27% of independents trust media Wow, that partisan divide.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  Unsurprising, considering who belongs in which camp.
  - treis 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      A broken clock...
    - SllX 4y ago
      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.
    - LatteLazy 4y ago
      Not sure about the middle point, but I'm still waiting for the other two? Hunter Biden had a laptop, but nothing illegal or unethical was on it. And lab leak remains completely evidence free. If you have actual evidence to the contrary I'd be happy to see it. But ever time I've asked in the past...
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        Already posted this on another comment, but that last sentence makes me want to make sure you see it. Summary here: https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-admits-the-emails-on-hunter-bidens-abandoned-laptop-are-real-and-newsworthy/ https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-a... Referenced NYT article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-... tldr; NYTimes now says the emails have been authenticated. Make of it what you will.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Um good? The media these days is terrible. Even the parts that's aren't actively deceptive and misleading are very very low quality.
commandlinefan 4y ago
Does the media even care? If they're not concerned whether or not we trust them in the first place, they won't get any more trustworthy.
- themedia 4y ago
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  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
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >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. Some people get it. From before the 2016 election: <http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...> <http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...> (so, so prophetic in why the Rust Belt broke for Trump) and after: <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of-the-press-presidential-election-2016/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugne...> The New York Times pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump-clinton.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...> that >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. She did say, however <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael>: >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.
sunsetops 4y ago
Brought to you by Pfizer
- 7speter 4y ago
  Owned by Comcast, WarnerBrothers(Discovery), News Corp., ViacomCBS…
whiddershins 4y ago
It should have always been low, we just didn’t have enough other information sources to be sure.
qclibre22 4y ago
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.
- themedia 4y ago
- rdtwo 4y ago
  What’s wrong with the other 34%? Are they the folks buying magnetic health bracelets and random organic supplements?
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Those are generally the “no trust” crowd. 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.
    - cyberlurker 4y ago
      Media aside, do you really think those two wars are comparable?
      - zerocrates 4y ago
        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.
      - mardifoufs 4y ago
        The second iraq war? Sure. Both are imperialist invasions based on false premises and lies
      - zmgsabst 4y ago
davesque 4y ago
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.
- mkr-hn 4y ago
  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.
  - barbariangrunge 4y ago
    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
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong#Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory,_2016_shooting,_and_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong#Pizzagate_cons... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Finchem#Response_to_the_2020_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Finchem#Response_to_the_2... Edit: Correction, Edgar Welch was released from prison this past March.
raydiatian 4y ago
What is the product news websites provide? It’s not valuable information on current affairs, it’s ad slots and attention bandwidth.
Imnimo 4y ago
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?
uptownfunk 4y ago
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.
etchalon 4y ago
I feel like a survey such as this might lean a great deal on what each individual person means by "Mass Media".
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 4y ago
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.
ankit219 4y ago
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.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > 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.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Here's a much more positive take [1]: 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. [1] https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/how-finland-can-help-us-fight-fake-news/ar-AA12TebR https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/how-finland-can-help-us... [2] http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf
- incomingpain 4y ago
  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.
rdevsrex 4y ago
The only way trust could be lower was if the media was owned by the state.
- codefreeordie 4y ago
hayst4ck 4y ago
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.
Dig1t 4y ago
Distrust in the media tracks pretty well with the removal of the FCC fairness doctrine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine I really feel that if we brought this back, we’d have more trust in the media
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  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.
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    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.
    - hayst4ck 4y ago
      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.
karmasimida 4y ago
Why trust media? It is very clear regardless of their political orientation, they just need clicks. Always ask yourself, does certain article benefit the writer or the writers' sponsors, and always assume the worst.
glonq 4y ago
I'll bet that American's trust in fellow Americans is at an all-time low too.
- gamechangr 4y ago
  why?
lapcat 4y ago
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?
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  > 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.
gamechangr 4y ago
I used to think CNN was trustworthy. I just can't take them serious now.
legitster 4y ago
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.
droptablemain 4y ago
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.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
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.
tb_technical 4y ago
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!
n65463f23_4 4y ago
Even PBS News hour which had always been pretty boring and unbiased(in a good way) has quite a bit of partisan nonsense on it these days
PolygonSheep 4y ago
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.
- thunky 4y ago
  > 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).

70 points by qclibre22 4y ago

I don’t believe any of this, not even for a second.

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

goodpoint 4y ago
The problem is that many are replacing unreliable mass media with even more unreliable facebook and alex jones.
- etchalon 4y ago
  No one trusts the media except for all the media they trust.
  - trelane 4y ago
    Yep. I'd really like to see this broken down by vendor. I'm not convinced those trusting Dems are counting Fox News as "the media" for instance.
  - deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
    “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.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      > There are many media outlets that specialize in selling the reality that a large enough population wishes to be true. Which ones don't do that? It's hard to find journalists who are not activists, or at the very least do not toe the line.
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
  - hnuser847 4y ago
    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.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  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
  - lamename 4y ago
    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.
    - hunglee2 4y ago
      yes you might be right.
  - ManuelKiessling 4y ago
    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. More skeptical, my ass.
    - spacemadness 4y ago
      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.
      - goodpoint 4y ago
        It's usually perceived control + sense of superiority + confirmation of existing bias.
  - 4y ago
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
amadeuspagel 4y ago
> 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.
- fcsp 4y ago
  There are a few [Citation needed] in here from my point of view
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    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. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
    - fcsp 4y ago
      > 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.
      - klipklop 4y ago
        >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.
asdff 4y ago
Don't give them too much credit, they aren't reading Chomskey by and large or else you'd see a revolution.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

> 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, 27% of independents trust media Wow, that partisan divide.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
Unsurprising, considering who belongs in which camp.
- treis 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    A broken clock...
  - SllX 4y ago
    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.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    Not sure about the middle point, but I'm still waiting for the other two? Hunter Biden had a laptop, but nothing illegal or unethical was on it. And lab leak remains completely evidence free. If you have actual evidence to the contrary I'd be happy to see it. But ever time I've asked in the past...
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      Already posted this on another comment, but that last sentence makes me want to make sure you see it. Summary here: https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-admits-the-emails-on-hunter-bidens-abandoned-laptop-are-real-and-newsworthy/ https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-a... Referenced NYT article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-... tldr; NYTimes now says the emails have been authenticated. Make of it what you will.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Um good? The media these days is terrible. Even the parts that's aren't actively deceptive and misleading are very very low quality.

commandlinefan 4y ago

Does the media even care? If they're not concerned whether or not we trust them in the first place, they won't get any more trustworthy.

themedia 4y ago
throwayyy479087 4y ago
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
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >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. Some people get it. From before the 2016 election: <http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...> <http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...> (so, so prophetic in why the Rust Belt broke for Trump) and after: <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of-the-press-presidential-election-2016/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugne...> The New York Times pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump-clinton.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...> that >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. She did say, however <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael>: >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.

sunsetops 4y ago

Brought to you by Pfizer

7speter 4y ago
Owned by Comcast, WarnerBrothers(Discovery), News Corp., ViacomCBS…

whiddershins 4y ago

It should have always been low, we just didn’t have enough other information sources to be sure.

qclibre22 4y ago

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.

themedia 4y ago
rdtwo 4y ago
What’s wrong with the other 34%? Are they the folks buying magnetic health bracelets and random organic supplements?
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Those are generally the “no trust” crowd. 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.
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    Media aside, do you really think those two wars are comparable?
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      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.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      The second iraq war? Sure. Both are imperialist invasions based on false premises and lies
    - zmgsabst 4y ago

davesque 4y ago

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.

mkr-hn 4y ago
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.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  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
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong#Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory,_2016_shooting,_and_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong#Pizzagate_cons... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Finchem#Response_to_the_2020_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Finchem#Response_to_the_2... Edit: Correction, Edgar Welch was released from prison this past March.

raydiatian 4y ago

What is the product news websites provide? It’s not valuable information on current affairs, it’s ad slots and attention bandwidth.

Imnimo 4y ago

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?

uptownfunk 4y ago

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.

etchalon 4y ago

I feel like a survey such as this might lean a great deal on what each individual person means by "Mass Media".

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 4y ago

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.

ankit219 4y ago

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.

mikkergp 4y ago
> 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.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Here's a much more positive take [1]: 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. [1] https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/how-finland-can-help-us-fight-fake-news/ar-AA12TebR https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/how-finland-can-help-us... [2] http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf

incomingpain 4y ago
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.

rdevsrex 4y ago

The only way trust could be lower was if the media was owned by the state.

codefreeordie 4y ago

hayst4ck 4y ago

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.

Dig1t 4y ago

Distrust in the media tracks pretty well with the removal of the FCC fairness doctrine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine I really feel that if we brought this back, we’d have more trust in the media

hayst4ck 4y ago
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.
- Dig1t 4y ago
  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.
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    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.

karmasimida 4y ago

Why trust media? It is very clear regardless of their political orientation, they just need clicks. Always ask yourself, does certain article benefit the writer or the writers' sponsors, and always assume the worst.

glonq 4y ago

I'll bet that American's trust in fellow Americans is at an all-time low too.

gamechangr 4y ago
why?

lapcat 4y ago

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?

puffoflogic 4y ago
> 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.

gamechangr 4y ago

I used to think CNN was trustworthy. I just can't take them serious now.

legitster 4y ago

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.

droptablemain 4y ago

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.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

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.

tb_technical 4y ago

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!

n65463f23_4 4y ago

Even PBS News hour which had always been pretty boring and unbiased(in a good way) has quite a bit of partisan nonsense on it these days

PolygonSheep 4y ago

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.

thunky 4y ago
> 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).