Media confidence ratings at record lows

https://news.gallup.com/poll/394817/media-confidence-ratings-record-lows.aspx

by asow92 • 4 years ago

86 110 4 years ago

news.gallup.com

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

Most ominous for Democrats is that the ratings among independents seem to be closer to that of Republicans, than that of Democrats. If you don't understand how people outside your part of the political spectrum think, it's going to be difficult to develop the right pitch to bring them onto your side of any issue.

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

Here is some data on “the perception gap” of people’s estimation of their political opponents compared to the self-reported reality: https://perceptiongap.us/

Teknoman117• 4 years ago

I found the chart titled "Increased Media Consumption and the Perception Gap" to be rather funny considering the title of this thread.

The more news you self-report as consuming, the higher your perception gap likely is. A rather damning data point regarding our media institutions.

mindslight• 4 years ago

I had a hard time taking this quiz because it feels like many of the points would be widely agreed with in the abstract, but I've often heard them suffixed with a "but ..." for the opposite intent. (eg "It is important that men are protected from false accusations pertaining to sexual assault, but ..." or "Many Muslims are good Americans, but ...").

So sure, partisans do need to realize that the "other side" really does share their core values. But from what I've seen cognitive dissonance is the primary force we're dealing with - the holding of conflicting thoughts with turning off of empathy for the "other side" that is taken as being in the wrong.

This groupthink dynamic even goes deep into what should be a relatively non-political topics. Many times I have ended up talking to Republicans about digital surveillance and big tech control, which they seem to be concerned about. But as soon as we get past their talking points, it's like they cannot process what I am saying. Simple and possibly actionable things like the fact that GPS satellites don't track your phone, but rather it's the software on your phone acting against your interests that does the majority of location surveillance [0]. The idea that these are systems we can understand and act on outside of the political sphere just doesn't compute. It's like the original concern was only thrown out to build consensus about how they're under attack by the outgroup.

[0] carriers sell surveillance data as well

(Funny enough I just finished the quiz and got -10%/-10%, so I actually gave the parties more credit than they deserved.)

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

Heh, +6% and +8%. The one I got most wrong was the "Donald Trump is a flawed person", I guessed 90% on that question, a -42% gap. Saying the man is literally flawless seems a tad blasphemous, I wonder how many republicans actually believe that. They must know he has a history of infidelity at the very least.

Neat quiz in any case.

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

I believe that's true of nearly every poll. People with Democratic-leaning views seem to be more willing to self-identify as Democrats than people with Republican-leaning views to self-identify as Republicans, so there are more Democrats than Republicans but independents skew towards Republicans.

somenameforme2• 4 years ago

Here [1] are some data on this specific question. 27% of Americans consider themselves Republican, 27% Democrat, and 43% Independent. Of the Independents, 46% lean Republican, and 45% lean Democrat.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

jrwoodruff2• 4 years ago

Just in my hometown, the local newspaper has gone from employing 400 people with a Sunday circulation around 100,000 in the early 2000s, to a Sunday circulation under 20,000 with fewer than 20 employees today.

All business functions, as well as printing, design, editing etc. have been eliminated or outsourced. Mid-size local newspapers are a scant shadow of their former selves, full of filler and national wire articles from USA Today, NYT and other major metros.

Television news has always primarily been fed by newspaper reporting. Without the depth and breadth of reporting that once was available for television to narrate and play some b-roll over (and with the advent of news as 24 hour entertainment source,) most television news is built on tiny nuggets of new information surrounded with pundits speculating about what things might mean, or what might happen.

Without robust local journalism, no one is covering your local county board meeting, that controversial school board meeting. No one is calling these people and asking them hard questions about their stance.

Social media seems to be filling the gaps, but in my opinion it's filling the gaps with vitriol, opinion, misinformation and a general sense of helplessness, instead of a sense of authority that speaks truth to power and shines light in dark corners.

emilsedgh• 4 years ago

Social media seems to be filling the gaps,

It's like we went from having town hall meetings/debates to bar fights.

buscoquadnary3• 4 years ago

A lot of the original founding fathers and organizations that helped precipitate the revolution started in bar halls.

Of course so did a certain Austrian painters party.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 4 years ago

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...

jrwoodruff2• 4 years ago

That’s a hard article to read, but really good. Gannet has basically done the same thing here - the newsroom is the only thing left, and it’s rented space in one corner of one floor. And they own all the major papers in Ohio now, and probably many other states.

supertrope3• 4 years ago

The demonetization of local newspapers and survival of national news organizations means less local reporting. The giant sucking sound of newsroom layoffs means the remaining reporters hit their deadlines by quoting PR copy as one of the voices in their story.

mikkergp• 4 years ago

This generates a lot more questions than it answers, does it say more about people or more about media? I hate television news no matter what. I guess it gets worse, but I don't know that I've ever had high confidence in television media. Do people trust the sources they perceive as biased towards their own interest better? Do lefists trust Jacobin but rate written news lowly because they think NYTimes? Same on the right with breitbart.

We created our media and our politics. I don't love our politics or our media, but they seems totally in line with my perception of where our population is at. If people hate it so much, why does it seem more ubiquitous than ever. I guess what people say they want and what people consume are different. "I fucking hate all this click-bait I keep clicking on"

philovivero• 4 years ago

Spend 7 years in a fever pitch screaming the worst partisan things you possibly can, and eventually even the people inside your filter bubble will start wondering... where is that evidence of Russian collusion that was 24x7 coverage for 3 years?

I thought that whole Hunter Biden thing was disinformation? We literally banned it from the internet! Wasn't that... and the whole lab leak thing supposed to be the delusions of right-wing whack-jobs?

Didn't the Buffoon President committed the worst faux pas ever in front of the Japanese prime minister? Didn't he say Charlottesville racists are OK? Hold on, if I do five minutes of research, I find some disturbing video in the moments preceding the video I was shown.

The media sound like literal sixth-grade children talking smack about the seventh-graders. The level of discourse is unbelievably immature.

I'm only surprised because I know so many intelligent people that are so deep into the filter bubble they haven't lost confidence yet. I'm glad enough people are paying attention to tell Gallup they are on to the ruse.

colinmhayes• 4 years ago

There is evidence of Russian interference, just read the mueller report. The hunter Biden stuff is disinformation in that it was being used to imply joe had something to do with hunters actions. The lab leak stuff still has minimal evidence. I agree this stuff shouldn’t be censored, but it’s not like it’s some smoking gun that we’re being lied to. Calling out politically charged distractions for what they are seems good to me.

There are plenty of racist trump quotes. No one is saying he called all the pro statue people at Charlottesville racist, but he did wait multiple days to call the racist ones out after he gave a speech about it. He repeatedly suggested moral equivalence between the two protesting sides. I haven’t heard about the Japan thing so I won’t comment on it.

I’ll even agree that the media has utterly failed us. There’s a lot to unpack there and I’d say a lot of the blame is on the populace and the government though. But defending trump like this just makes you sound unhinged tbh.

rvz• 4 years ago

There is evidence of Russian interference, just read the mueller report. The hunter Biden stuff is disinformation in that it was being used to imply joe had something to do with hunters actions. The lab leak stuff still has minimal evidence. I agree this stuff shouldn’t be censored, but it’s not like it’s some smoking gun that we’re being lied to. Calling out politically charged distractions for what they are seems good to me.

The lies that the media has propagated to its viewers to trust every. single. thing. they say is very powerful. It has so much influence to get their minions and viewers to continuously repeat their lies to the general public, just like the m̶o̶s̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶e̶a̶c̶e̶f̶u̶l̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶t̶e̶s̶t̶s̶ riots of 2020.

So here we are years later the same HN users have been manipulated to keep repeating the Russian interference story which found that the Clintons were involved, the censoring of a media outlet exposing the nastiness and family corruption of Hunter Biden with the whole media quick to labelling it as 'disinformation' when it was all admitted to be true later.

So they all knew what they were doing at the time. Perhaps that is how they are currently behaving when they are covering up their lies to protect Joe Biden's incompetency and inability of being president and he is in fact the worst president in history; and I thought Trump was bad.

No amount of media cover-ups, spin, lies and manipulation can hide that.

Amezarak• 4 years ago

The hunter Biden stuff is disinformation in that it was being used to imply joe had something to do with hunters actions.

This has been the go-to defense in the media for why the Hunter Biden stories don't matter. But this is just more media disinformation. There are messages from Hunter literally complaining that Joe makes Hunter pay 50% of his salary to his dad, and that he isn't allowed to move any money around without his or his lawyer's approval. This is clear corruption. There's also messages where the Secret Service was bailing Hunter out of his (illegal) actions again and again. There's also content that's been leaked that makes it impossible to understand how Hunter isn't in prison right now for soliciting underage prostitutes if there's not more corruption than that going on.

Yeah, that whole story was probably the moment I was done with the media altogether. Them condescendingly explaining after the fact that sure, it might have been real, but they didn't want to report on it to protect me was enough for me.

bshepard• 4 years ago

Yes, Joe had a lot to do with his son's actions. Joe's position in power enabled his son to sell connections. You can deny this, if you want, anything can be denied, but the on-the-ground evidence seems quite secure. If only they had just put the laptop contents directly on p2p servers and not tried to use the Rupert Murdoch smear machine.

nemo44x4• 4 years ago

The prestigious media doesn’t write for the public that’s interested in this type of thing - that is, the masses. They write for approval from their colleagues, socialites, doner class elites. And those that believe they are part of it, or at least adjacent.

Honestly, if a far right reactionary party won massively and began to dominate institutions and social systems then these same media people would write the journalism that supports that cause. They always support whatever culture they elites of society are into. Any that don’t are classified as “nutjobs”, “conspiracy theorists”, and all together considered unimportant truth be damned.

rr8882• 4 years ago

I'm mixed on this because it seems people trusted the media too much in the old days, seems naive. But now clearly there are lots of people/governments that are trying to reduce peoples believe in all institutions, including media.

hourago• 4 years ago

This. "You cannot trust anybody" and all "politicians are the same" are very powerful tools to avoid accountability for big corporations and the super rich.

It's a divide and conquer strategy against the average citizen.

rr8882• 4 years ago

Someone posted Vlad the other day, its a good video of how Russian propaganda does exactly this and how other groups have picked it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j6Vg7yLx54. Its really good watch, talking about how people are desperate not to get fooled, combined with floods of alternative theories, in the end people just give up.

buzzwords• 4 years ago

I feel like the rest of the world is catching up. Growing up muslim is FELT like my community was misrepresented and framed on a particular way. Now, I'm sure either side of the political division feel exactly as I have for years.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

i’m a Democrat and my confidence in the media is trashed. Everywhere I’m hearing the same, even Redditors who are ultra-liberal will rant about the news. Its not a partisan thing.

CNN, Washington Post, NY Times, “Vice”, MSNBC. Fox News, Sky News, Newmax as well. I’m pretty sure these sites sometimes flat-out get paid to write promotional and attack articles. I’m absolutely sure most of the articles are clickbaity content, with misleading headlines, exaggerated suggestions, and polarized opinions in “factual” content.

I have a theory that the Democratic news literally caused Trump to be elected (albeit unintentionally) when they wouldn’t stop talking about him. They along with the Republican news definitely caused both sides to be much more partisan and angry. All that anger you hear about online and recently have started seeing in person? I really believe it just wouldn’t be there if not for the news. And not “reporting the factual state of the US” news, the exaggeration and polarization and doom-saying in the news articles. They are fulfilling their own wild prophecies.

“But not all the news!” Yeah, not all the news. Although some sites which used to be decent and rational (e.g. NY Times) have become clickbaity and opinionated, I still have many sources I can rely on which still post level-headed, objective content. NPR is a must, but I’m pretty sure The Associated Press, Reuters, and The Economist are also still ok.

Furthermore, even with the exaggeration and opinions, most news sites like CNN and NY Times still report accurate facts, you just have to pick them out and discard the opinions and implied stuff and misdirections. Idk how the Republican side is doing but I kind of doubt Fox News is at the point where they’re flat-out lying yet either, they just heavily suggest stuff which are “out there” takes or get disproven later.

But when I say “yeah, some news sources are ok, and most news sources have the right facts, although…” That means my confidence in the media is low. That’s what this poll is asking, right? “What is your confidence in the media?” My confidence in the media is low. Because when I think of “the media”, I think of CNN and NY Times and all those opinionated sites, and while I expect they will never truly misreport facts, I can’t really trust them because the facts are hidden in misleading statements and opinions.

scsh• 4 years ago

Absolutely. The Democratic news, as you termed it, is very much responsible for platforming what were, until now, what we'd consider much more fringe ideologies. At the very least they are helping to shift the Overton window in the wrong direction.

mellosouls• 4 years ago

Mentioned before here a couple of times, Tangle is one writer's attempt at finding a way through the bias of left/right in the mainstream press:

https://www.readtangle.com/

buscoquadnary3• 4 years ago

Honestly I keep hearing about how we need to fix trust in the media and what not. But I am wondering if society will end up adapting.

Here's what I mean. We believe that it is ideal that the media gives us clear accurate unbiased information and that is what should be happening, but what if there is an alternative that we accept that all the media is biased as hell and we adjust and filter oir credulity to match. I know that if I go to outlet #1 I'll get one story and if I go to outlet #2 I'll get a different story and knowing that I don't trust either of them completely but instead bank on being able to understand between them.

Now I know some people will object that something like that isn't happening in today's world and that people are being driven to extremism but it might take a little time.

What seems much scarier to me is we try and force "neutral" "fact checked" information to be the only kind and that anyone outside of that is a "threat to democracy" because for me that seems far far more worrisome.

gfodor2• 4 years ago

I’ve often thought maybe AI will end up helping here. It might be possible to build an AI that can take in all these biased stories and digest them into something that actually has more signal than noise. Lots of possibilities: try to write a de-biased version, annotate the stories to point out the bias and rhetorical tricks used, find the set of facts that are the same across all sources and distill them, etc. not a silver bullet but seems like a rich space for exploring how to turn the garbage produced by the media into signal by leveraging the fact that these are adversarial organizations that do have some predictable constraints on what they will say.

asow922• 4 years ago

Why would the public trust an AI over an editorial team? Couldn't it be just as biased?

kevingadd2• 4 years ago

How is an AI automatically going to turn bad data into good data? When in history has this been the case? So far we haven't managed to magically create an AI that can turn huge piles of bad data into good data, you see all sorts of stories about machine learning problems caused by misclassified training data, etc. Bad news stories and opinion pieces feel close to a worst case here since so many of them are subtly wrong in ways that would make it hard to even tag them clearly and accurately at scale for use as a training set. And at the end what's the AI going to do? Tag up every news story so that 60% of the text is yellow or red indicating that all of it is misleading or a lie?

If an article quotes "sources" how is AI going to determine whether or not the sources are informed and whether the author is selectively quoting them?

jl6• 4 years ago

I know that if I go to outlet #1 I'll get one story and if I go to outlet #2 I'll get a different story and knowing that I don't trust either of them completely but instead bank on being able to understand between them.

This isn’t how media bias works. It is rare for media outlets to publish outright lies; if a fact is presented as a fact, it probably is a fact. The following techniques are much bigger sources of bias:

1. Opinions masquerading as facts. Not always easy to spot.

2. Selective publishing of stories. Outlet #1 and Outlet #2 make radically different choices about what stories to cover.

Fact checkers are powerless against these patterns of deceit, so a strategy that focuses on facts will win the battle but lose the war.

buscoquadnary3• 4 years ago

1. I don't think is to hard. In fact a handy metric I use is "is someone trying to predict what will happen in the future, or ascribing to someone else certain motives, or an ability to read someone else's mind?" If so that's an oponion, as is any phrase that includes the word "likely", "probably" "possibly" "estimated that" or "experts say" any of those mean someone is trying to pass opinion off as fact.

As for #2 if it is small enough to be ignored then it probably wasn't super important, whereas if it is significant everyone is going to be arguing about it.

The realization came when I realized despite all of the news stories I scoured about things I usually got the same consistent facts and most of the rest of the story was just either 1) quoting yahoos off the street/Twitter or 2) people trying to predict the future or push an agenda. Start looking for it in the news you consume it becomes pretty easy to detect pretty quickly.

shswkna• 4 years ago

I can argue that choosing what stories are important and which not, is a matter of what one values.

I as the editor/owner of a media house might find it important that politician A has ties to company X. Another media house might think, this isn’t important and find it more valuable for the public to know that a law is to be passed that will limit my freedom to do business as I please.

Neither is wrong or right.

I suggest that everything is an “opinion” of a sort, even the publishing of verified facts .

tootie3• 4 years ago

If you read a lot of layman media criticism it's frequently that people want more bias, not less. People don't just want to know what happened, they want to know how to feel about it. It's why opinion shows/blogs/podcasts are so popular

BitwiseFool• 4 years ago

"It is rare for media outlets to publish outright lies; if a fact is presented as a fact, it probably is a fact. "

I broadly agree, and my take on the situation is that journalists "lie" through selectivity, insinuation, and frequency. This isn't quite the same thing as 'spin', but they overlap very much.

I also find that very rarely are actual data-point facts in dispute, it is the interpretation wrapped around the facts where the manipulation takes place and the disputes arise.

aquaduck• 4 years ago

I think you've missed the big one, which is contextualization. Outlets A and B might both publish the same quote from the same source making some claim. But outlet A might contextualize it by talking about his degrees, credentials, and experience, without mentioning that he's a pariah in his field. Outlet B might contextualize it by ignoring his credentials entirely and going to great lengths to emphasize that he's a pariah in his field. Readers will come to very different conclusions depending on which contextualization they see.

nemo44x4• 4 years ago

You need to create the illusion of truth. Surround a fact with opinions, fabrications, and outright lies. Repeat it over and over and always make sure there’s some truth and credibility to it all.

When you understand this you understand how our media works.

jjoonathan• 4 years ago

Careful, center-seeking strategies on their own tend to incentivize extremism because they systematically under-weight correct positions within the Overton window while they over-weight incorrect extreme positions designed to nudge the Overton window.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's an excellent idea to seek out both sides, but developing and applying trust heuristics is critical or the strategy is easy to exploit.

Nothing has improved my respect for traditional media as much as the evolution of my trust heuristics for alternative media.

swayvil2• 4 years ago

The idea that a profit-motivated entity can be trusted to deliver honest facts seems rather absurd on the face of it.

rainsford2• 4 years ago

We believe that it is ideal that the media gives us clear accurate unbiased information and that is what should be happening...

I think the problem is that most people don't really believe that. I mean they'll claim that's their platonic ideal if asked, but in private their information consuming habits will be wall-to-wall Newsmax and straight up unhinged Youtube channels. Their goal isn't to arrive at accurate facts that reflect reality, whether it's through finding unbiased information sources or interpolating between conflicting biases as you suggested. They want the bias, just in their preferred direction.

gandalfgeek• 4 years ago

That's what happens when journalists think their primary job is activism for their obviously correct worldview, rather than, you know, reporting.

havblue• 4 years ago

Problem being: opinion pieces are cheap and very entertaining if your audience agrees with you. Investigative journalism is expensive and can be boring, not to mention potentially bad for ad revenue.

deepsquirrelnet• 4 years ago

Exactly. People have spent the last 20 years voluntarily addicting themselves to rage porn, and now we’re surprised that this is the product that is being sold?

I always find this discussion so disingenuous. We KNOW why the media isn’t trustworthy. This country needs to look in the mirror and realize that we are being sold the things that we keep buying. If you don’t like untrustworthy media, stop consuming it. Don’t read it. Don’t watch it. Don’t pay for it, or allow a company to monetize you.

The capitalist mirror is simply reflecting the ugliness that is already there.

matrix_overload2• 4 years ago

Activism is a side effect. Newspapers compete for clicks and eyeballs, so they need massive amounts of content. And who could be the cheapest producer of content without any ambition of owning it? A person with religious belief in self-righteousness, who's doing it not for raising their own blog's ad revenue, but for pushing something they believe in onto the masses.

Now get 2 competing camps of such people, weaponize them against each other by providing outreach, and enjoy your ad revenue growing like a hockey stick (*).

* - Until the moment when the self-righteous mob declares you the next enemy of the people and raids your grain silos because they have been flinging shit at each other throughout the planting season.

WalterSear4• 4 years ago

"Both sidesism" is just as much of a problem, if not moreso.

And sensation seeking is more of a problem.

vorpalhex2• 4 years ago

This feels like a non-sequitor. Either you are reporting reality or not. I don't care what side you think you are on - there is no "fake but well intentioned" award to be had.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

given that as per the article Democratic trust in the media fell after the election of Biden the explanation is if anything the opposite. The news media isn't partisan enough for the tastes of the audience.

This seems also intuitive to me given that the media despite obviously having its own biases depending on the paper appears significantly less polarized than the electorate. I find it interesting how many people default to blame the media rather than the consumers of news despite the question being entirely open if the issue is perception and expectation or media output itself.

I think the dominant narrative is also thrown into question by what people replace established media with. It's not like they're all signing up for the CS Monitor, but rather consumers appear to flock to pundits or online communities who are highly self-selected and cater specifically to particular groups and viewpoints.

rainsford2• 4 years ago

If that was the actual cause, you'd expect to see surging demand for sources offering better reporting, but that's obviously not what's happening. Instead, the fall in trust in traditional media coincides with a rise in popularity of alternative sources of information that are objectively less trustworthy, less accurate, and less interested in unbiased reporting.

I think there's definitely an argument to be made that the New York Times or CNN aren't great at the whole reporting thing (although I suspect I'd make a different argument than you would), but I don't buy that's why trust in them is going down if the alternatives people are turning to are Breitbart and a Blue Lives Matter Facebook group. People don't want less activism and more reporting, they just want activism they agree with.

lmm• 4 years ago

The illusion that NYT and CNN were neutral has been smashed, it won't come back for a generation if at all. Turning to Breitbart et al isn't because people want the bias, it's because they've given up on ever finding a genuinely moderate centrist source.

matrix_overload2• 4 years ago

The media decline started over a decade ago with the transition from the physical publications to online.

It turned out, the limited space and the delay of printed issues forced the editors to prioritize. The newspapers were competing on quality content. With the advent of the attention economy, the model changed to competing for the strongest emotional response, so the newspapers split into rivaling camps, churning out low-quality online publications made to enrage people, while selling their attention to the highest bidder on the ad market.

I hope people will eventually realize that their attention has become a commodity [0], and will start watching it better. If most people are smart enough to not give away their money to the first person asking for it, we can find a way to do the same with our attention.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

kordlessagain• 4 years ago

Six words:

Turn off, tune out, drop in.

wsinks• 4 years ago

Ha! Clever reversal. I like the idea of 'drop in' lately, since that's akin to office hours - the time when stuff can really get done because it's not the performative lecture.

tootie3• 4 years ago

It's not just that. Newspapers had much more predictable revenue and loyalty. If you wanted news, you pay for a paper to be delivered and/or you tune in to channel 2 every evening at 11.

Now it's all search and social. Anyone can post a headline that gets clicks. It's easier than ever for low-value aggregators like The Hill can summarize anyone else's reporting and steal their SEO. Or worse yet, people getting news second hand by watching hot takes on TikTok.

I don't mean to sound like a grump but it's a real problem and it's incentivizing the wrong things.

Goronmon• 4 years ago

The media decline started over a decade ago with the transition from the physical publications to online.

Was the transition to online the root of the problem, or was the root of the problem that drops in readership and revenue of physical publications that led to decisions to focus in online content?

Or to put it a different way, would media be in better shape now if they had stuck to physical publications? Or would they have just died off and been replaced with online publications?

Animats• 4 years ago

The transition to online came with a transition from subscription to ad-supported. There used to be a lot of "advertising throwaway" newspapers, found in free racks and dropped on doorsteps. A few are still around. Their news content was just filler to get people to read the ads. "Real newspapers" cost money and competed on content.

Online "newspapers", after becoming ad-supported, were downsized down to the advertising throwaway level. Just PR, news service content, punditry, and an occasional local story to give the impression of being for real.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

My personal recollection is that local newspapers went into sharp decline about 20 years ago, which is about when Craigslist became a mainstream brand, ruining local newspapers that relied on selling classified ads. The demise of classified ads made newspapers increase their subscription prices, which subsequently lost them subscribers. With fewer eyeballs to sell, newspapers could no longer charge as much for advertising, gutting what revenue they had left. Local newspapers started dropping like flies in the 00s. This is how I recall it, and more or less what wikipedia describes on their page about the decline of newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers

That page also mentions that TV had been hurting the newspaper industry since the 50s. But I think the real decline started roughly 20 years ago. 24/7 cable news, starting in the 80s, probably did a lot of damage too. It's hard for a newspaper to compete with all the fancy sound effects and animations that television news use to mesmerize viewers.

akomtu• 4 years ago

Who is paying the news agencies? They are all online these days and hardly any readers pay. This leaves us with funding from institutions.

egypturnash• 4 years ago

I can't upvote this enough.

supertrope3• 4 years ago

Advertisers. Even that revenue source mostly goes to GOOG and META. The loss of newspaper subscription dollars and classifieds revenue has hollowed out local reporting. You get what you pay for. People complain about paying for a copy.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 4 years ago

I think that this slow erosion of media confidence is due to bad actors both foreign and domestic.

Domestic bad actors don't like the investigation and oversight. Foreign bad actors like when Americans get bad information and elect bad leaders or fight with each other.

The media is also stuck with a population who either cannot afford to pay for quality information or choose to receive "free" news from TikTok and Facebook. Well, there's nothing more expensive than free.

A strong and free press is essential to Democracy.

caseysoftware• 4 years ago

As I've noted here a few times:

Over 10 years ago (2008 iirc), I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or only possible conclusions.

I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead. (Odds are you could do this with other channels as well, CNN is what I watched at the time.)

Years later, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

FredPret• 4 years ago

I’m running a similar experiment - I bought some financial magazines in 2016. I plan to finally ready them in 2026 and see if any of it panned out. My guess is probably not.

h2odragon• 4 years ago

The real question is, why was "confidence in the media" ever so high? They have always been propagandists, since "the media" was whatever pamphlets and papers the local printer ran off. The rise of mass media with "wire services" and radio changed things only in that they began to advertise integrity as a value (without necessarily demonstrating it, there was some crossover betwixt them and the first radio preachers in developing techniques).

The billion voices of the internet may not make Truth apparent, but they make the shape of bullshit all too familiar for us to swallow it whole and unknowing.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

I think the methods of propagandists are enduring because it takes each generation a while to catch on. By the time they do, they're too old and uncool for the new kids to listen.

snapcaster• 4 years ago

I think it was a brief blip starting with watergate where people started thinking journalists were crusaders for justice instead of political hacks. I see this more as reversion to "normal"

DEADMEAT2• 4 years ago

I find it interesting that the study is only about print and TV news, since I get about 90% of my news from my state's public radio channel. I'd say that I have an extremely high confidence in both NPR and my state's local stuff.

asow922• 4 years ago

And where would you rate yourself on the political spectrum?

DEADMEAT2• 4 years ago

Based on the distinctions from the OP, I'd say Democrat since that's how I usually vote, but I live in a very Republican state.

eric_b• 4 years ago

The NPR news hour is, mmm, sort of OK (better than something like WashPo or Fox News anyways). But their non-news programming is unlistenable to me.

trasz• 4 years ago

Current financial model for media incentivises pumping out crap instead of valuable content.

nostromo2• 4 years ago

Confidence in all American institutions is down.

It's funny though, if you mention the most trusted institutions are small business, the military, the police, the medical system, and religion -- a lot of elites would gasp.

And if you told them the least trusted institutions are government, news media, and big business they'd become apoplectic.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...

user39393822• 4 years ago

That's a striking list because I feel like I could write a book about the corruption in the military, police, medical system, and religion.

My philosophy is that humans are individually all corruptible and corrupt to some degree, so when you compose a system from humans the system inherits those characteristics and there's no way to design policies which remedy that. I submit all of history to the present moment as proof that I'm correct.

WalterSear4• 4 years ago

And all politics is either an argument about how to circumvent that, or that same corruption - manifested as an argument on how to circumvent that.

twh270• 4 years ago

There's perception, desire, and actual performance. Maybe we want to believe in certain institutions (a little) more; maybe we perceive them to be more trustworthy because of what we (think we) know about them.

I agree that humans are all corruptible, but strongly disagree that there's "no way" to design policies which remedy that. Corruption thrives when there is secrecy and a lack of accountability, and is reduced when there is transparency and where power is limited.

We'll never be able to eliminate it, but we can reduce it by creating systems that increase transparency and prevent people from having unbridled power.

fdgsdfogijq• 4 years ago

Would they really gasp? Elites arent that dumb, clearly news anchors know they are losing trust, but the money behind the scenes pushes the propaganda anyways

somenameforme2• 4 years ago

Being out of touch only requires one to live in a bubble. It says nothing about somebody's intelligence.

colpabar2• 4 years ago

The propaganda is what allows elites to exist at all, whether they're aware of it or not. If all us regular people stopped bickering over gender identity and really opened our eyes to see how bad wealth disparity really is, we'd riot and burn down their mansions. Elites live in a bubble, and one of the membership requirements is never letting anyone know you don't believe what the people on TV say.

vkou• 4 years ago

The military is the only 'trustworthy' institution in that list, and only to a very limited extent.

We can trust it to not carry out a coup, to not get involved in domestic affairs, and to not play geopolitics without consulting with the DOS first, but that's about the extent that trust goes to.

For the others, you seem to be confusing 'ignorance of' or 'sentiment for' with 'trust'.

wyldberry• 4 years ago

Well in that list, the military is the only one that's realistically governed the same across the branches.

Police departments are federal, state, county, and city.

Religion is highly fragmented.

I imagine trust in "religion" would change if it was broke out into it's representative governing bodies as opposed to one big bucket.

jeffbee2• 4 years ago

Counterpoint to your conclusion: when asked about specific companies, Americans rank Amazon and Google above virtually everything else include Jesus and almost as much as the military. The "big business" they distrust is media and banks.

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2020/01/americans-tr...

nostromo2• 4 years ago

Interesting data -- but the survey is regarding "religious leaders" not "Jesus" -- which is very different.

vannevar2• 4 years ago

Virtually all of the decline is among Republicans, which makes sense given that their leadership has focused for many years now on attacking the media as a political strategy. Add to this the fact that many Republicans believe the Trump administration's fabrications about election fraud, and that those claims are routinely (and correctly) identified as fabrications in the media, and it's not surprising at all.

vannevar2• 4 years ago

Would any anonymous downvoter care to identify where this comment is inaccurate and provide some explanation as to why you think so? The poll results show very clearly that the increasing mistrust is mostly among conservatives. And unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Republicans have been criticizing the media for many years now. So that just leaves Trump's fabricated election fraud claims. If you have any evidence for that, you should probably provide it to his legal team, because in 60+ court cases, they've never presented any.

gcau• 4 years ago

Things the media publish/say generally go on to be used as sources in Wikipedia. Mostly in the less scientific pages, and the more political/social pages. This has lead me to really sceptical of things I read on Wikipedia, given you can read something and expect it's a hard fact, but the source is seemingly just some mainstream journalist just giving their opinion. Basically, I think low media confidence also looks bad on Wikipedia.

supertrope3• 4 years ago

It's hard to operate a newspaper company in 2022. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake...

mbostleman• 4 years ago

Confidence in media being low is only a bad thing if, for some reason, it should have ever have been high. The general realization that I've come to in the last decade is not so much that media has gone from good to bad but that a veneer of artificial quality has been removed to reveal a core that hasn't changed since the 18th century when newspapers were funded by political parties. I think looking at it this way is much healthier and likely more realistic.

acd• 4 years ago

I see a few contributing factors.

People consume news curated by content recommendation algorithms. If views are different, you trust that content less since you get used to content fitting your world view filtered through algorithms.

Income equality is widening which is causing distrust in the system. Gini coefficient is inceasing the rich are gettibg richer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

This has created are very biased society.

Research on trust and gini inequality. "The major finding is that inequality is associated with low trust" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4885546_Determinant...

president• 4 years ago

Media now is just another "business" or "corporation" looking to maximize profits and shareholder value and/or influence politics. And when there's not enough wealth to go around, bad people extract wealth from things that provide value and corrupt them in the process.

americanprep• 4 years ago

As they should be. This is pretty simple.

For example, there’s full on videos of Hunter Biden doing meth and banging hookers yet it isn’t being reported on by major news outlets.

Easy for all to tell the priority of ‘news’ is just political propaganda. It’s overt

jmrm• 4 years ago

This is not just bad. This is even worse if we consider a lot of people trust more any random charismatic person on Facebook or Twitter than a journalist, but the sad thing here is how I understand them.

In Spain we have so many examples about how mass media have made up news in order to manipulate people than I don't think many people trust in them any more. Just look up for a policeman called Villarejo and you will find how some police agents, politicians, and mass media business were working together hiding shady business and affairs of Juan Carlos I (the former King of Spain), making fake news about opposing politicians, and making smokescreens to hide corruption cases.

Without trusting mass media and random social networks, you only can verify yourself those spicy news looking in different places to know the truth, and even doing that, you can't have the real truth since every media have their ideology and they usually are really partisan to the party that back their ideology.

bryananderson• 4 years ago

“When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.”

—Steve Jobs

Until the late 1990s, there was effectively an oligopoly of news sources, with massive barriers to entry. You had 3-4 TV networks, a couple cable news networks, a couple newspapers in your town, and a couple wire services that provided all the national news for those papers (there were also local TV stations, but the meat of their news content came from either the national networks or the local papers). All of the above were owned by the same few national corporations, except some of the local papers which were owned by local elites.

This oligopoly had good, bad, and ambiguous effects.

The bad was that there was basically no room for voices outside of the corporate consensus of the day.

The ambiguous was that trust in media was high, but that this trust wasn’t necessarily earned, because there weren’t many sources outside the oligopoly to call out any untrustworthiness.

The good was that the media could be boring a lot of the time (because reality and the topics that matter are often boring, to most people at least) without losing eyeballs and going out of business.

When the Internet took off, the oligopoly died (although legacy media only grew more concentrated), and all of these effects went away.

Suddenly there was a cacophony of diverse views available everywhere. Sometimes good (criticizing a stale consensus and forcing people to question the status quo), sometimes bad (extremism and even incitement to violence), sometimes ambiguous or debatable.

Suddenly it was possible to read sharp criticism of legacy media, fair or not, and maybe decide that they’d never been so great.

And suddenly legacy media found itself fighting for its life with online blogs and social media personalities who had no qualms about twisting or ignoring “boring” reality to capitalize on visceral emotions and compete for eyeballs.

It is not that legacy media CEOs ever had more qualms about the sober truth, but they were in a stable oligopoly with high barriers to entry. Everyone could eat, there was not much in the way of Darwinian selection pressure. There was sensationalism and stupidity (that Steve Jobs quote is referring to the media before the Internet), but the incentives for sensationalism were bounded by the lack of other options for news consumers.

But when the Internet dropped barriers to entry down to zero, no one had the luxury of being boring, ever. If you didn’t relentlessly chase market share to keep your advertisers, someone new would, and you’d be dead.

Institutional media had to join the clickbait upstarts or be killed by them. Why? Because clickbait is what we chose. We didn’t mean to, of course—no one then or now would say that they’d like to trade high-impact investigative journalism for red-meat infotainment. But the attention economy is all about using our psychology against us. We are viscerally attracted to shock, sensationalism, and in-group/out-group conflict, even if we know that what we’re clicking on is misleading or doesn’t matter. This has played out in the evolution of legacy media, as many outlets have died while most survivors have pivoted (at least in part) to low-value clickbait. Good luck staying in business if you’re spending a year paying two experienced journalists to put together a six-part investigation on corruption in some agency that 90% of citizens have never heard of. See how your traffic compares to your competitor who paid a 22-year-old minimum wage for a half-hour’s work on a listicle of the top 10 most outrageous moments from the Johnny Depp trial. Who’s getting more ad money?

Of course human psychology is not new, and legacy media always engaged in its share of sensationalism (Hearst vs. Pulitzer, O.J. Simpson, take your pick). But there were always limits to the incentives pulling the media in that direction, because what were you going to do, just not read or watch anything? Now you have unlimited options to get all sensationalism, all the time, and if legacy media doesn’t give it to you then they’re just going to die.

We all know this is happening and we don’t like it, which is presumably part of the reason for the decline in trust in media (in addition to simply having more dissenting voices of all kinds available). But we don’t seem willing or able to change the fact that we are the proximate cause of it. Ultimately our clicks and subscriptions determine which kinds of content succeed or fail. But what can we do when our own psychology is being used against us?

AzzieElbab• 4 years ago

True is media organisations is low. Trust in individual journalists is undeservingly high

tootie3• 4 years ago

What exactly is the point of asking people's confidence in a medium instead of an actual newsroom? Do I trust newspapers? It 100% depends on which newspaper!

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

Well, yeah.

Every source is highly politicized.

Fake stories (or stories with little truth and lots of innuendo) are run. True stories are buried, when it suits the political narrative. Politicians are mostly actors.

Why would anyone have confidence in that sort of mind controlling?

Media confidence ratings at record lows

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