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
> 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.
good argument, though I would counter by saying that partisanship is more to do with the decline of regional newspapers / broadcasters vs the nationals. Bigger market means you can afford to play to extremes to capture one edge of it, rather than cater for the whole
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
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.
> I wish "the media" would go back to reporting the news instead of repeating talking points.
I see this said a lot but I don't think that's a simple request, assuming what we're really saying here is "objective facts, not opinions". There's a finite amount of news you can report so which objective facts you choose to show your readers is in itself a subjective decision of "newsworthiness". And how do you present that news to your audience? Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
I’m also very dubious that you could build a sustainable business around such an idea. I think a lot of people say they want objective news but when presented with a choice they’ll favour media that caters to their existing biases.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of garbage media out there today and it can absolutely get better. But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
Maybe we don't need 18 different 24/7 "news" channels? That's why we have these "filler" programs.
>But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
News isn't sexy. News doesn't sell. Stoking emotions does, and that's why we are where we are. Even in the days of the newspaper, the OpEd section is what got attention.
Its a problem with the 24/hr newscycle. Back in the day you would hear the news at 6 on your television, or on your radio. Now, due to the constant need for content, news has gotten more extreme. Fox and CNN need something constantly on their channels, news sites need constant content on their websites, etc. The news at 6 is no longer a thing, and that fact feels like it has hurt just about everything
> There's a finite amount of news you can report so which objective facts you choose to show your readers is in itself a subjective decision of "newsworthiness".
That applies to fact checkers too. Anything ideologically inconvenient will be ignored.
> Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
How is getting a list of things that have happened each day awful? What's better than RSS?
The problem I see is instead of reporting facts, I see alot of stories with these words in their title - "maybe", "could", "possibly, "potentially". I think its all about churning out volume(of stories) to generate clicks. Maybe the solution is to get a paper subscription.
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.
I think it's easy to blame "the media" for poll results like this and to be fair I do think they deserve some of the blame. But I also don't think Americans' trust in the media is shaped by reasonable (or even coherent) criteria, and for that reason "just report the news" seems unlikely to be the solution.
Were the issue of trust really about a fairly and accurately reporting news, you'd expect the drop in trust in "mass media" to coincide with the rise of alternative media that does a better job on just reporting the news. But instead what you see is a rise in source that are basically just partisan propaganda barely even pretending to be legitimate news sources. This is especially true on the right side of the American political spectrum, where the biggest drop in mass media trust happens to be. If Republican problems with mainstream media is that the media doesn't just report the news, it seems odd that this would have led to the rise of Fox News and then Newsmax and OAN when Fox wasn't partisan enough.
This isn't just a Republican problem, although as they have the biggest shift in media trust I think it's fair to use them as the example. But overall, I think a simple explanation is that Americans increasingly see facts as subjective, and therefore the trustworthy news source is the one that provides me with facts that fit my existing worldview. There's a super obvious Trump divergence on the trust graph between Republicans and Democrats. Was it the case that Democrats suddenly thought the media was doing a better job just reporting the news and Republicans somehow came to the opposite conclusion? Or was it just that the Democrats liked the negative Trump coverage and Republicans didn't?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
The fairness doctrine never applied to cable news, never applied to newspapers or magazines, didn't/wouldn't have applied to the Internet, social media, etc. Its importance is routinely overstated.
Readit News
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.
It doesn’t make accounting sense, but neither does politics. Media is power.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I see this said a lot but I don't think that's a simple request, assuming what we're really saying here is "objective facts, not opinions". There's a finite amount of news you can report so which objective facts you choose to show your readers is in itself a subjective decision of "newsworthiness". And how do you present that news to your audience? Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
I’m also very dubious that you could build a sustainable business around such an idea. I think a lot of people say they want objective news but when presented with a choice they’ll favour media that caters to their existing biases.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of garbage media out there today and it can absolutely get better. But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
Maybe we don't need 18 different 24/7 "news" channels? That's why we have these "filler" programs.
>But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
News isn't sexy. News doesn't sell. Stoking emotions does, and that's why we are where we are. Even in the days of the newspaper, the OpEd section is what got attention.
That applies to fact checkers too. Anything ideologically inconvenient will be ignored.
> Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
How is getting a list of things that have happened each day awful? What's better than RSS?
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.
Were the issue of trust really about a fairly and accurately reporting news, you'd expect the drop in trust in "mass media" to coincide with the rise of alternative media that does a better job on just reporting the news. But instead what you see is a rise in source that are basically just partisan propaganda barely even pretending to be legitimate news sources. This is especially true on the right side of the American political spectrum, where the biggest drop in mass media trust happens to be. If Republican problems with mainstream media is that the media doesn't just report the news, it seems odd that this would have led to the rise of Fox News and then Newsmax and OAN when Fox wasn't partisan enough.
This isn't just a Republican problem, although as they have the biggest shift in media trust I think it's fair to use them as the example. But overall, I think a simple explanation is that Americans increasingly see facts as subjective, and therefore the trustworthy news source is the one that provides me with facts that fit my existing worldview. There's a super obvious Trump divergence on the trust graph between Republicans and Democrats. Was it the case that Democrats suddenly thought the media was doing a better job just reporting the news and Republicans somehow came to the opposite conclusion? Or was it just that the Democrats liked the negative Trump coverage and Republicans didn't?
Dead Comment
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...
[2] http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, that partisan divide.
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.
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.
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/ju...
https://larswillnat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2013-america...
“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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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?
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.
I really feel that if we brought this back, we’d have more trust in the media
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.