It’s taken decades of deafness, arrogance, blindness, ignorance, downright stupidity, and collusion with one political party. But mainstream media has finally squandered more public trust than ever.
Designing the governance of a new nation 250 years ago, the Founding Fathers gave constitutional protections to one institution deemed important, the press, as an independent watchdog of government, which they did not trust.
Modern media have forsaken that responsibility, and as recently as the last 12 months, joined the silent conspiracy to abet the cover-up of a demented president and attempted perpetuation of a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration.
And now American citizens have awarded that media, as both an institution and business, the lowest level of trust ever, according to Gallup.
Today, seven of 10 adult Americans say they have no confidence or not very much at all in newspapers, radio, and television to report the news accurately, fully, and fairly.
Collectively, only 28 percent profess a fair or great deal of trust; for the first time, the number has fallen under 30 percent. Among Republicans, the confidence level sits at just eight percent. Even among Democrats, only a bare majority of 51 percent trust the media.
That 28 percent figure is down from 40 percent five years ago and 31 percent just a year ago, as the awful recognition sank in of the media’s willful complicity in cloaking the mental and physical deterioration of the Democrat president in an election year.
This decay, combined with the Internet and the explosion of social media, has fed the proliferation of a wide variety of alternative information sources, many of which have, shall we say, varying standards of accuracy and fairness.
Decades ago, a handful of print and broadcast outlets were the main sources of trusted news. Walter Cronkite ended his show every night with, "That's the way it is." And no one argued.
Today, most people get their news from social media and snippets of video clips online, which are as reliable as overheard comments in a barber shop.
Yet in just 11 months, millions of Americans will cast midterm election ballots based on unreliable information and impressions drawn from these fractured sources.
Media and their defenders try to blame the deep plummet in trust on Donald Trump, who has been relentlessly attacked by the media and has harshly counterattacked since he launched his political career in mid-June 2015. He has called them corrupt, evil, and an “enemy of the American people.”
Rather than complain about media coverage, as all presidents do, Trump has taken to suing news outlets such as ABC News and CBS News.
In the past year, he has won several legal settlements from the media worth multiple millions for their inaccurate and unfair coverage. And First Lady Melania Trump has secured retractions and apologies for inaccurate coverage of her.
Trump has had a long-term, complex relationship with the media, which hates him but loves the bonanza news consumption numbers he delivers.
The president enjoys, even covets, media attention. Indeed, during his first term, he often sought it multiple times a day, often to the detriment of advancing his own agenda.
This term, he has been much more disciplined, while still attacking the media accurately for their profound left-wing bias. My RedState colleague Brad Slager provides regular coverage of this often astounding bias.
The truth, however, is that Trump is not creating this media mistrust. It’s already here, loud and clear for anyone to see, unless they work in that media. But now, a critical mass of Americans have had their own personal experiences with media inaccuracies and bias.
Trump is using existing media distrust. Fact is, public trust in media has been falling ever since Gallup began measuring it in the 1970s, back when Trump was studying economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
In those days, between 69 and 72 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the media. By 1997, Gallup polling found only 53 percent had confidence.
It hovered around 50 percent until falling to 44 percent in 2004 and has failed to reach a majority ever since.
In my mind, these sad numbers reflect a reaction to an American journalism that has changed. Earlier this year, I wrote here about my experiences in mainstream journalism that began in the 1960s:
Something else I’ve learned is that the journalism I fell in love with long ago and tried to live up to for so long is not the journalism of today. And our society is the worse for it.
We made mistakes as reporters in my day…They were honest mistakes, sometimes just plain ignorance. But they were not willful. And hopefully, we learned from them.
I’m sure – well, actually, I hope – there remain young journalists somewhere with old-fashioned values who strive to tell their stories as they truthfully are, not as they want them to be.
Who feel a duty when producing the very first drafts of history to report honestly, resisting any temptation to tinker with truth, even to fix a society that's given them everything.
Watergate was an important watershed moment for politics and journalism. It forced the first resignation of a sitting president. He was Republican, which made it okay.
The violence and divisiveness of the anti-war movement, combined with the resulting months of nonstop Watergate coverage, the books, and the movie to help attract a generation of young wannabe journalism stars less interested in telling revealing human stories and intensely focused on fixing the flaws of society as they saw them, whatever that took.
It’s important, I believe, for a democracy to have a set of generally accepted facts. They can be debated endlessly, of course, like an HOA meeting. But as a society, we start from the same subject menu.
We don’t have that today, sadly to my eyes, because the once aptly-named mainstream media has been polluted into a side-stream of liberal propaganda. Naturally, alternative streams of information have developed to fill the void (and make money).
Each has its own convenient, selective set of facts crafted to market a narrative that appeals to one particular audience. The only thing common is no longer a set of facts, but a search for audience and profit by any means. Few care about the accumulating distrust in the larger society.
It’s a free market, but it is also a cacophony that feels like disorienting turmoil. People ceaselessly argue over select portions of conflicting narratives that are completely unrelated and make no sense. To make that point during student arguments that meandered into irrelevance, I had a teacher who used to interrupt with, "What's that got to do with the price of bananas?"
Trump may not care, but this leads to a president who has been elected twice but has had a job approval over 50 percent for just 10 days last winter.
And it leads to an ineffective opposition party stuck in a political tar pit of defeat and divisions, unable to provide a natural political balance to those in power, to address the reasons for its own defeat, or to admit its moral and ethical crimes of recent years.
As one result, a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 63% of voters have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. That’s the highest unfavorable since 1990. It also found that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle issues, including the economy, inflation, tariffs, and immigration.
This would seem to augur well for next year’s crucial elections, which will determine the fate of Trump’s final two White House years. Though much can change before then; think economy. And Democrats shucking their stupor.
But here’s a twist, as deftly explained by Steve Kornacki: Separate polls are showing that while Democrats are very unhappy with their party, that doesn’t appear to be driving them toward the GOP.
They’re not unhappy because of the Biden scandal. They’re unhappy because of leadership’s ineffective opposition to Trump.
Let’s be fair, effective opposition to this term’s Trump policy blizzard is not easy. But the base’s anger does explain congressional Democrats’ simultaneously stubborn and suicidal stance, fomenting the Schumer Shutdown.
Finally, speaking of polls, The Hollywood Reporter has published an interesting new one with Morning Consult. It mirrors past political polls that show while Americans hold low opinions of Congress, they usually come down in favor of their own local member.
The THR survey finds that while Americans do hold low opinions of news media in general, they hold much higher trust levels for individual media personalities.
Among those, ABC News’ David Muir and NBC’s Al Roker come in highest, while NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo is lowest.
