As the decline in trust that the mainstream media is giving them real and not fake or biased news continues, that decline is also driving down Americans’ readership and viewership.
Recent polls from Gallup and The Economist/YouGov reveal the continued cratering of credibility of the Fourth Estate. According to Gallup, nearly four in every 10 Americans have “no confidence at all” that the mainstream media is giving them the straight scoop — the news pure and simple without bias or slant. That’s the lowest since Gallup has been asking this question starting in 1972: “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?”
The “nones” barely registered in 1974, when the media’s credibility was at its historically highest level. At the same time, the mass media’s credibility in reporting the news fairly hit its high, at 72 percent.
It’s been all downhill from there, the drop exacerbated in 2016 when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump began stating publicly what many were privately believing: that the mainstream media had become a transmission belt for “fake news,” promoting a liberal agenda instead of reporting the unadulterated news.
Even Gallup authors were surprised at the sharp increase in those having no confidence in the mass media: “The current assessment of the media [is] the grimmest in Gallup’s history.”
When Gallup asked the question last year, the pollster learned that most Republicans — 57 percent — said they had no trust in the media, while 41 percent of Independents agreed. Since then both numbers have risen, and Democrats’ trust in the media has dropped an astonishing 12 percentage points.
This decline is driving viewership and readership. Pew Research just revealed that fewer than four in 10 Americans follow the news “all or most of the time.” Seven years ago that number was over 50 percent.
The blame may safely be placed on the media, whose efforts to twist the news continue to be exposed. Dan Gainor, writing for Fox News, called out The New York Times for its blatant distortion of news about the Middle East conflict:
The Times ran with a main headline claiming, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds In Hospital, Palestinians Say.”
The paper went on to claim “500 dead.”
Turns out none of it was true. It wasn’t an Israeli attack, it was a Palestinian rocket launch, it didn’t hit the hospital, and the death toll was nowhere near 500. The headline ran over a photo of devastation, giving the impression that it was the hospital. It wasn’t.
It was all propaganda from Hamas itself.
Read that again: The Times was using the terrorists themselves as legitimate sources for reliable news!
That leaves readers in a quandary. Where can they find “real” news? Keeping in mind that every news outlet has a bias, it’s helpful to look at sources where, although the bias is clear, the intent is to leave the reader with enough information to make up his own mind.
When The Economist/YouGov ran a survey asking where Americans get their news and how much they trusted 22 prominent news organizations, it learned that, of all of them, The Weather Channel was the most highly regarded!
From there, the decline in credibility was precipitous. Finishing near the bottom were outlets including MSNBC, Axios, CNN, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New Yorker, Newsweek, The Guardian, and National Public Radio (NPR).
Near the top were the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
Readers looking beyond the 22 outlets surveyed by YouGov will likely find what they are looking for at OAN, Newsmax, the New York Post, The Federalist, Independent Journal Review (IJR), Daily Mail, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).
And, of course, there’s the present online outlet, TheNewAmerican.com, a distinctly conservative, Americanist, pro-Constitutionalist news source that is sponsored by The John Birch Society.