Media trust hits new low
For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media, according to data from Edelman's annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios. Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.
56% of Americans agree with the statement that "Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."
58% think that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public."
What? Sure the media's fawning over Biden's inauguration and the conspicuous absence of CNN's Covid ticker since 1/20 is a bit suspicious, but the media is the guardian of truth! And you don't want to be against truth, do you?
I have a similar experience. One example. Covid-19 reporting in the media. I listen to the podcast TWIV (This Week in Virology). It's a group of leading virologists that discuss viruses and invite guests from around the world. Anthony Fauchi was a guest for instance. These are real scientists. It's no fake news.
There is no evidence that the new variants of Covid-19 are more virulent or more infectious. Either for or against. There is evidence that people are getting tired of self isolating and people are engaging in more risky behaviours. Which is a more plausible explanation for the rise of spread and mortality. But the news sources are all shouting from the rooftops that the problem is that the new virus is more dangerous, in spite of zero science to back it up. It's incredibly sloppy reporting. It's something we associate with tabloid journalism. Not serious news.
It's like this all the time. Newspapers fucking suck at reporting science accurately. If they are this bad at reporting something I do know, then how bad are they on reporting things I don't?
I was in Egypt during the revolution. I saw first hand what was happening. Al Jazeery was accurate. All the other mainstream newsources spread their own pet cinderella story about what was happening and how to interpret it. It was all fantasy. Everybody in the West were shocked when the Muslim Brotherhood one the election. Not readers of Al Jazeera.
I have another example. I took part of an anti-racist demonstration/riot in Stockholm 1993. It was against a neo-Nazi parade. I'm pretty sure I saw at least one Nazi skinhead be beaten to death. The guys head caved in. I saw other nazi skins beaten to the point where they must have needed hospitalisation. One skinhead jumped into the water. This is in Winter. It was -15 c. No way he survived. Not a line about how many skinheads were hurt. Since, in the news, they were the bad guys, we were made out to be the victims. We weren't. We absolutely slaughtered the nazi skinheads. Both figurately and in some cases literally. When I read the news I was shocked. We weren't little innocent little flowers. I was a teenager at the time. Which is my defence. I didn't know any better. But there were so much more of us that we didn't need to attack them. They didn't stand a chance. But in the media were were the underdogs. All the pictures emphasized this.
This is just a couple of examples of stuff I know because I was there. What about the things I haven't seen?
Mainstream news is so full of shit. They spread narratives people want to hear, rather than telling people what they need to hear. That's always been true. With click journalism all the media has become more like tabloids. The Internet, while spreading fake news, is also better fact checking sloppy mainstream news. And tabloids in turn are more tabloidy than ever.
No, I don't have a solution.
But this low trust in the media is well earned IMHO.