7 ms·

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

by SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

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.
  - subsubzero 4y ago
    Also don't forget the medias reporting of covid: Jan-Feb 2020 - Masks don't work! don't worry about covid, get a flu shot! April 2020 - Covid lives on surfaces for 17 days, disinfect all surfaces, also all masks are effective against covid spread(even cloth ones!) Early 2021 - Vaccines(pfizer, moderna) will stop symptomatic covid with +90% effectiveness, also you have to have a vaccine otherwise you will spread covid to others. Late 2021 - Oops, cloth masks are not effective against covid(omicron), also vaccines for young children wear off in terms of effectiveness after a few weeks.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I'm not saying the media is blameless, but this seems like a lot of post-hoc thinking - you're treating the media like they should have known that omicron would exist and so they shouldn't have reported the effectiveness of the vaccines on earlier strains, or reported whatever was the current understood science of the time because things later changed when they didn't know that.
    - antihipocrat 4y ago
      I suspect that if the implied interpretation of your observations was the majority view it would negatively affect the public's opinion of science and government agencies rather than the media.
      - HKH2 4y ago
        When they fail to investigate blatant inconsistencies, they are culpable.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > Hunter Biden's laptop was dismissed as a hoax but turns out it's legit Does it? I'm genuinely not up to date here but the Hunter Biden laptop story was all about the supposedly explosive stuff stored on the laptop and I've still not seen any proof of that.
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the contents were probably legitimate in a story on a related subject. Unsurprisingly, it hasn't been a very high profile story in the mainstream media. edit: link: 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-...
      - afavour 4y ago
        I guess I don’t really understand what you’re looking for here. You’re complaining about a lack of mainstream media coverage then pointing to mainstream media coverage. Typically papers write a follow up story when new facts have emerged, what new facts have emerged?
        seti0Cha 4y ago
        > Typically papers write a follow up story when new facts have emerged, what new facts have emerged? Great question. What new facts HAVE emerged that caused the New York Times to change their stance on the provenance of these emails? Seems like a story should have been written about that, right? Unless no new facts did emerge, but that would be even more concerning, wouldn't it? That would mean they were either intentionally misleading people or changing their mind capriciously. It's bizarre to me the way people treat this as a non-issue. I myself wanted the story to be false because I didn't want it to cost Biden the election. I don't, however, approve of being mislead about things, even if I agree with the goals. This is doubly true for a news organization. It's a failure of their primary responsibility. edit: even more strange to get downvoted for saying this. I wish some of you who think poorly of what I said would offer a reason. I don't care about the internet points, but I'd like to know what the contrary position actually is.
- bhawks 4y ago
  Check the graphic in TFA. The trend is downwards across party lines. There was a bump (from 50s to 70s) for dems when trump was elected but it continued a downtrend from that peak - even while he was in office. The media industry ironically has a huge image problem - at its roots is the fact that their incentives do not align with their readership - they've actually made that readership a product to be sold to the highest bidder.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  I would expect that the Democrats and Republicans are seeing the world (and the media) through blue- and red-tinted glasses. I would expect that the independents are, on average, seeing more clearly. And yet the independents see this much closer to how the Republicans see it. I find that somewhat surprising. Could be telling us that the most of the (non-Fox) media leans left, and the independents see it but the Democrats don't.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    > Could be telling us that the most of the (non-Fox) media leans left, and the independents see it but the Democrats don't. Well, yeah. That big jump when Trump got elected isn't because the media suddenly became much more trustworthy and only the Democrats figured it out.
    - rainsford 4y ago
      Sure, but you could make a similar observation about the sudden Republican drop. Did the media suddenly become less trustworthy and only Republicans figured it out?
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        That supports my point, not rebuts it. My thesis is that the media shifted to the left, causing Democrats to see them more favorably and Republicans to see them less favorably, and the drop and the gain both indicate that.
        rainsford 4y ago
        I wasn't disagreeing with your thesis so much as pointing out that for both Republicans and Democrats, "trust" is more of a proxy for "does this coverage agree with my politics" (you might be making the same argument). I don't know if you can say it shows a media shift one way or the other though, since one could make a pretty strong argument that Trump was fairly terrible among Republican politicians and the media didn't have to move at all for his coverage to be worse and delight Democrats while angering Republicans.
randyrand 4y ago
This is the exact opposite I would have expected given that most major news outlets are left.
- Markoff 4y ago
  Those are percentages for those who TRUST media, seems matching, though I'm wore surprised by republican percentage, they don't trust even Fox anymore? I guess good for them. Personally I read world news from various sources including BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, etc
  - randyrand 4y ago
    I totally misread that!
eej71 4y ago
Check out the generational difference that exists for those who identify as Republicans. 6% for age range 35-54. Whereas those younger and older was relatively higher.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  yes, which is why it’s unfortunate young people don’t vote. if they did, blue america from sea to shining sea.
  - PonySoldier 4y ago
    Is it supposed to be self-evident that a "blue america from sea to shining sea" would be a good thing?
    - hayst4ck 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - mjjavani 4y ago
        There is absolutely an inverse relationship here, but it's between "post-modernism," incorrectly labeled liberalism, and education. Most students attending American/West European universities have unfortunately been indoctrinated by New Left ideology instead of being "educated." What you call liberalism today is proof of the absolute stranglehold of the New Left and post-modernist ideology over Western intellectuals. Allan Bloom wrote about it in "The Closing of the American Mind" discussing how Frankfurt School nihilists such Herbert Marcuse and Michele Foucault and post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida burrowed into the Ivy League (later the rest of academia) beginning after WWII, fully taking off in the 60s. New Left liberalism and post-modernism are unfortunately the bastard children of Nietzschean Nihilism. The belief that truth is relative is contrary to Enlightenment values of reason and fact based observations. Of course, post-modernists believe that Enlightenment thinkers were racists because they were white Europeans and math is racist because Europeans systematized modern math (never mind that the founding fathers of Algebra and Trigonometry were mostly Persians). Be that as it may, please spare us the lecture about how Liberals "believe in science" and conservatives are close minded. There is nothing Liberal about mainstream American culture, as it is the product of Frankfurt School ideology (Please read Herbert Marcuse essay on A critique of Pure Tolerance)and what you call "Conservatism" is actually classical liberalism. So dear Alice, welcome Through the Looking-Glass aka America in 2022!
svachalek 4y ago
I have to wonder though, how many of those Republicans count Fox News as "the media"? Somehow despite being the biggest media of all they have somehow managed to define the media as everyone else.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  We don't trust it that much. We see OK you through in a couple solid commentators, like the guy in the plaid, but that's it, and that's all the trust they get. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch after all, and they do some incredibly Democrat bullshit things all the time.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I completely agree. This poll is non-sensical since "the media" is an indirect reference. The question is more about what the indirect reference points to rather than about the state of our information apparatus itself. A much better poll would be about trust in explicit news sources, which would lead to the obvious conclusion that everyone trusts the sources of news they subscribe to, those sources create a particular reality, and that sources that paint pictures of different realities aren't trust-able.
- trelane 4y ago
  Yes, and vice versa
- panny 4y ago
  >I have to wonder though, how many of those Republicans count Fox News as "the media"? Rs don't trust Fox either. They called AZ for Biden early. Neil Cavuto clowned himself over Trump taking HCQ. Tucker Carlson helped bury the Hunter Biden laptop story. Nobody trusts Fox on either side.
xen2xen1 4y ago
Independent sources verified that 93% of journalists voted for Hillary Clinton. The media overall is very much leftist.
- The_Stone 4y ago
  I think you're conflating "leftist" with "voting Clinton in order to avoid a Trump presidency". You're also conflating Hillary Clinton with leftism, when she is a centrist whose policy could have lined up with Reagan in the 80s.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Do you have a source for that? A 2013 study showed that journalists had increasingly identified as independent rather than Democrat or Republican. Only 28% Democrat, lower than at any time in the previous 40 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/just-7-percent-of-journalists-are-republicans-thats-far-less-than-even-a-decade-ago/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju... https://larswillnat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2013-american-journalist-key-findings.pdf https://larswillnat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2013-america...
incomingpain 4y ago
To get an idea of why the republicans lost trust. There's a great quote from a leading republican. “Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.” -Noam Chomsky. Oh, wait he's not a republican.

> 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.
- subsubzero 4y ago
  Also don't forget the medias reporting of covid: Jan-Feb 2020 - Masks don't work! don't worry about covid, get a flu shot! April 2020 - Covid lives on surfaces for 17 days, disinfect all surfaces, also all masks are effective against covid spread(even cloth ones!) Early 2021 - Vaccines(pfizer, moderna) will stop symptomatic covid with +90% effectiveness, also you have to have a vaccine otherwise you will spread covid to others. Late 2021 - Oops, cloth masks are not effective against covid(omicron), also vaccines for young children wear off in terms of effectiveness after a few weeks.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I'm not saying the media is blameless, but this seems like a lot of post-hoc thinking - you're treating the media like they should have known that omicron would exist and so they shouldn't have reported the effectiveness of the vaccines on earlier strains, or reported whatever was the current understood science of the time because things later changed when they didn't know that.
  - antihipocrat 4y ago
    I suspect that if the implied interpretation of your observations was the majority view it would negatively affect the public's opinion of science and government agencies rather than the media.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      When they fail to investigate blatant inconsistencies, they are culpable.
- afavour 4y ago
  > Hunter Biden's laptop was dismissed as a hoax but turns out it's legit Does it? I'm genuinely not up to date here but the Hunter Biden laptop story was all about the supposedly explosive stuff stored on the laptop and I've still not seen any proof of that.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the contents were probably legitimate in a story on a related subject. Unsurprisingly, it hasn't been a very high profile story in the mainstream media. edit: link: 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-...
    - afavour 4y ago
      I guess I don’t really understand what you’re looking for here. You’re complaining about a lack of mainstream media coverage then pointing to mainstream media coverage. Typically papers write a follow up story when new facts have emerged, what new facts have emerged?
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        > Typically papers write a follow up story when new facts have emerged, what new facts have emerged? Great question. What new facts HAVE emerged that caused the New York Times to change their stance on the provenance of these emails? Seems like a story should have been written about that, right? Unless no new facts did emerge, but that would be even more concerning, wouldn't it? That would mean they were either intentionally misleading people or changing their mind capriciously. It's bizarre to me the way people treat this as a non-issue. I myself wanted the story to be false because I didn't want it to cost Biden the election. I don't, however, approve of being mislead about things, even if I agree with the goals. This is doubly true for a news organization. It's a failure of their primary responsibility. edit: even more strange to get downvoted for saying this. I wish some of you who think poorly of what I said would offer a reason. I don't care about the internet points, but I'd like to know what the contrary position actually is.
bhawks 4y ago
Check the graphic in TFA. The trend is downwards across party lines. There was a bump (from 50s to 70s) for dems when trump was elected but it continued a downtrend from that peak - even while he was in office. The media industry ironically has a huge image problem - at its roots is the fact that their incentives do not align with their readership - they've actually made that readership a product to be sold to the highest bidder.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
I would expect that the Democrats and Republicans are seeing the world (and the media) through blue- and red-tinted glasses. I would expect that the independents are, on average, seeing more clearly. And yet the independents see this much closer to how the Republicans see it. I find that somewhat surprising. Could be telling us that the most of the (non-Fox) media leans left, and the independents see it but the Democrats don't.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  > Could be telling us that the most of the (non-Fox) media leans left, and the independents see it but the Democrats don't. Well, yeah. That big jump when Trump got elected isn't because the media suddenly became much more trustworthy and only the Democrats figured it out.
  - rainsford 4y ago
    Sure, but you could make a similar observation about the sudden Republican drop. Did the media suddenly become less trustworthy and only Republicans figured it out?
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      That supports my point, not rebuts it. My thesis is that the media shifted to the left, causing Democrats to see them more favorably and Republicans to see them less favorably, and the drop and the gain both indicate that.
      - rainsford 4y ago
        I wasn't disagreeing with your thesis so much as pointing out that for both Republicans and Democrats, "trust" is more of a proxy for "does this coverage agree with my politics" (you might be making the same argument). I don't know if you can say it shows a media shift one way or the other though, since one could make a pretty strong argument that Trump was fairly terrible among Republican politicians and the media didn't have to move at all for his coverage to be worse and delight Democrats while angering Republicans.

randyrand 4y ago

This is the exact opposite I would have expected given that most major news outlets are left.

Markoff 4y ago
Those are percentages for those who TRUST media, seems matching, though I'm wore surprised by republican percentage, they don't trust even Fox anymore? I guess good for them. Personally I read world news from various sources including BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, etc
- randyrand 4y ago
  I totally misread that!

eej71 4y ago

Check out the generational difference that exists for those who identify as Republicans. 6% for age range 35-54. Whereas those younger and older was relatively higher.

KerrAvon 4y ago
yes, which is why it’s unfortunate young people don’t vote. if they did, blue america from sea to shining sea.
- PonySoldier 4y ago
  Is it supposed to be self-evident that a "blue america from sea to shining sea" would be a good thing?
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - mjjavani 4y ago
      There is absolutely an inverse relationship here, but it's between "post-modernism," incorrectly labeled liberalism, and education. Most students attending American/West European universities have unfortunately been indoctrinated by New Left ideology instead of being "educated." What you call liberalism today is proof of the absolute stranglehold of the New Left and post-modernist ideology over Western intellectuals. Allan Bloom wrote about it in "The Closing of the American Mind" discussing how Frankfurt School nihilists such Herbert Marcuse and Michele Foucault and post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida burrowed into the Ivy League (later the rest of academia) beginning after WWII, fully taking off in the 60s. New Left liberalism and post-modernism are unfortunately the bastard children of Nietzschean Nihilism. The belief that truth is relative is contrary to Enlightenment values of reason and fact based observations. Of course, post-modernists believe that Enlightenment thinkers were racists because they were white Europeans and math is racist because Europeans systematized modern math (never mind that the founding fathers of Algebra and Trigonometry were mostly Persians). Be that as it may, please spare us the lecture about how Liberals "believe in science" and conservatives are close minded. There is nothing Liberal about mainstream American culture, as it is the product of Frankfurt School ideology (Please read Herbert Marcuse essay on A critique of Pure Tolerance)and what you call "Conservatism" is actually classical liberalism. So dear Alice, welcome Through the Looking-Glass aka America in 2022!

svachalek 4y ago

I have to wonder though, how many of those Republicans count Fox News as "the media"? Somehow despite being the biggest media of all they have somehow managed to define the media as everyone else.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
We don't trust it that much. We see OK you through in a couple solid commentators, like the guy in the plaid, but that's it, and that's all the trust they get. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch after all, and they do some incredibly Democrat bullshit things all the time.
hayst4ck 4y ago
I completely agree. This poll is non-sensical since "the media" is an indirect reference. The question is more about what the indirect reference points to rather than about the state of our information apparatus itself. A much better poll would be about trust in explicit news sources, which would lead to the obvious conclusion that everyone trusts the sources of news they subscribe to, those sources create a particular reality, and that sources that paint pictures of different realities aren't trust-able.
trelane 4y ago
Yes, and vice versa
panny 4y ago
>I have to wonder though, how many of those Republicans count Fox News as "the media"? Rs don't trust Fox either. They called AZ for Biden early. Neil Cavuto clowned himself over Trump taking HCQ. Tucker Carlson helped bury the Hunter Biden laptop story. Nobody trusts Fox on either side.

xen2xen1 4y ago

Independent sources verified that 93% of journalists voted for Hillary Clinton. The media overall is very much leftist.

The_Stone 4y ago
I think you're conflating "leftist" with "voting Clinton in order to avoid a Trump presidency". You're also conflating Hillary Clinton with leftism, when she is a centrist whose policy could have lined up with Reagan in the 80s.
lapcat 4y ago
Do you have a source for that? A 2013 study showed that journalists had increasingly identified as independent rather than Democrat or Republican. Only 28% Democrat, lower than at any time in the previous 40 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/just-7-percent-of-journalists-are-republicans-thats-far-less-than-even-a-decade-ago/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju... https://larswillnat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2013-american-journalist-key-findings.pdf https://larswillnat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2013-america...

incomingpain 4y ago

To get an idea of why the republicans lost trust. There's a great quote from a leading republican. “Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.” -Noam Chomsky. Oh, wait he's not a republican.