Americans' trust in media plummets to historic low: poll (2023)

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/24/americans-trust-in-media-plummets-to-historic-low-poll

by delichon • 2 years ago

48 47 2 years ago

I'm glad to see everyone's realizing that the news is nothing but a constant lie by the ruling class to make us do things they want us to do. I can't comprehend how anyone could trust it. It has been admitted by countless people that there are government agents at the highest levels of all the most important corporations, especially news outlets.

I find it funny that Democrats had a big surge of thinking highly of the news when it was on a 24/7 fuck trump loop for 6 years straight.

allears• 2 years ago

You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to realize that media is untrustworthy. It's your attention that they're after, and selling your attention is how their profits are made. Like any good capitalistic enterprise, there are no holds barred in their pursuit, and if the truth is a casualty, that's just collateral damage.

adamredwoods• 2 years ago

> the news is nothing but a constant lie

Wow, how did you come to this conclusion? News is an onion, in that there are many many layers. Every single news story (from established sources that strive for truth) has truth and bias in it, and it is up to the viewer to realize that we have to put effort into aggregating from different sources. Single source news is not recommended. It's a lot of work to get unbiased information, and I don't know if it exists in the world. Even your own perception is biased (consider the parable of the blind men and the elephant).

Constant lie? No. Biased? Yes.

zrn9002• 2 years ago

News is an onion, in that there are many many layers. Every single news story (from established sources that strive for truth) has truth and bias in it

If there was any 'truth' in anything that the modern Western msm pushes, they wouldnt be able to lie about nonexistent WMDs for 8 years straight without even one of them breaking the line.

Anyone who thinks that was a 'one time' affair is a gullible fool.

zrn9002• 2 years ago

Amazing how there are still those who are gullible enough to downvote your post only 20 years after Iraq war... They must think the media collectively collaborating to push the WMD lie without even one of them breaking the line was a 'one time' affair and not the act of an orchestrated, organized and well-run establishment. They lied just 'that one time'. Not before, not after. Even if lying is immensely profitable and with absolutely no consequence.

mindslight• 2 years ago

I saw through the Iraq war push at the time, and it's very obvious to me that the media has an overwhelming corporatist agenda. The problem with OP's comment is the insinuation that the criticism of Trump was all some fake media push. This gaslighting narrative gets put in ever more stark relief as that petulant con artist's influence continues to fade. What actually happened is that the interests of corporatists and individuals became more aligned when American institutions were under attack.

iFire• 2 years ago

I would try making friends in other places and get their thoughts. Nothing is impermeable forever.

Sometimes knowing the truth is a matter of life or death even if the truth is not easily obtainable, but ignoring the truth is not logically defensible.

rileymat2• 2 years ago

Is this based on “the media” generally or the media they choose to consume?

For instance a Fox News viewer might not trust “the media” but does trust Fox; meanwhile a MSNBC viewer thinks MSNBC is trustworthy and the Fox News viewer is being lied to.

burnerthrow008• 2 years ago

Generally, I think. At least for me.

The media has gotten too addicted to clickbaity headlines and pushing drama. The drama is exhausting, and the headlines border on misinformation.

It has gotten so bad that I find myself routinely checking the comments first to see how the author misinterpreted or twisted some fact to arrive at the headline. That, plus realizing you’ve fallen for the Gell-Mann amnesia effect again, and you have a perfect recipe for distrust of the news.

It really feels like the only legitimate newspapers left are The Economist and FT.

tatrajim• 2 years ago

I have curtailed my reading of both The Economist and the FT over the past few years due to their increasing stridency in coverage of American politics and tone-deaf reporting on East Asia, prompting me to realize I had likely succumbed to Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

The chart shows a rough trend of declining trust in "mass media" beginning in about 1995 and continuing until today.

I would guess the amount of time people spend consuming media over those decades has increased, and that people trust the media they choose to listen too.

Imagine someone says "the media in general is not trustworthy" and everyone nods in agreement. "But the media we listen too is good", again everyone nods in agreement. Then gradually, everyone realizes they all listen to different media. What do they do now? They mostly keep quiet and retreat into their own media bubble.

How many hours have you spend watching political content the last month? How many hours have you spent engaged in calm and respectful talk with someone who would challenge your beliefs? Do you even have someone you can disagree with in a calm and respectful way? Are you able to disagree in a calm and respectful way?

Not sure where I'm going here, just a train of thought. I've been thinking about how I can get more of my "news" from people who I can actually talk to (not necessarily in person). I'm tired of political commentary where, if I have a question, I can't do anything, the talking head keeps going, skipping over any counter points that might be raised. Why am I listening to people who wont listen to me? How can I find people to listen to who will also listen to me in return?

codegrappler• 2 years ago

I’m with you. As someone with the opposite political view of the majority around me, I’m in constant fear of disagreeing with the status quo messaging. In a glass-half-full way it has helped me build my Socratic method muscles in these situations.

up2isomorphism• 2 years ago

According to it, the mass media are controlled by the old democrats. lol

0xbadcafebee• 2 years ago

There was this period after WWII where newspeople risked their lives and dedicated themselves to telling the truth and working for the betterment of society. There were organizations that took the fourth estate seriously and fought hard to investigate, educate, and speak truth to power.

But if you go back in history, other than about a three-decade blip, the media has never been trustworthy. It's always been schlock designed to make money, entertain, and push positions and ideologies, since the beginning, all the way up to today. The baby boomers tried to make this statement about the media being a force for good, but it was ultimately a pipe dream, and people knew it even in the 70s. Yet they kept trying to sell us this bill of goods about the media's inherent virtue and necessity.

The end result is modern generations just expect the media to be something it's not, and couldn't ever be for long. So of course they're disillusioned. Ever since Nixon, Americans' falling trust in society and widening political and ideological gaps have led to a status quo of anomie, cynicism and apathy.

And I think that's great! You can't break an addiction until you hit rock bottom. Society has been so fucking obsessed with the media for so long that they can't imagine a world where someone isn't spoon-feeding them garbage. But the less people trust it, the closer they are to realizing that they might need to check up on the shit they're eating to see if there's poison in it. "Mama broadcaster and Papa newspaper would never deceive me - we vote for the same politicians!!"

My hope is that in 10 years, people will finally get off their fat, lazy, stupid asses, and do some due diligence. Get some critical thinking skills and learn to research. Look into local politics and find out what's happening around them. Maybe actually learn what the positions of political candidates are and what the actual implications of them are. (Ok that last one will never happen, but a boy can dream)

BriggyDwiggs42• 2 years ago

Sounds dystopian and exploitable, but I actually think near-future llms will be pretty good for this. You could get one to search a subject for 10 minutes and it could filter tons of information into a summary with links back to sources.

delichon2• 2 years ago

And as Gemini famously demonstrated, tell you what its trainers want you to hear. LLMs will detract from critical thinking about politics at least until thoroughly jail broken.

ecoquant• 2 years ago

Maybe, or maybe the previous ideological gaps are so far in the past that we can now only see the idealized version.

You don't hear much about discrimination against Irish or Polish Americans these days, unlike "the good old days".

People thought Kennedy could not win the Presidency because that would give the Pope too much power.

Surely, there are many differences like this that have simply faded with time and have been replaced by new, equally ridiculous divides that will also fade in time when replaced by another set of ridiculous divides.

When that happens, our divides today will sound as absurd as the Pope controlling a Catholic president just because they are Catholic.

How about a near civil war between Catholics vs Protestants? How could that ever happen? Only in the "good ol days!"

sirspacey• 2 years ago

Most of these comments seem to conclude it is biased media that has lost trust, but I think that’s gaslighting by media & politics.

I have lost trust in all media.

I did a simple exercise on Google News, I blocked a media source if:

1. The title was clickbait 2. The reported story turned out later the be false 3. There was no actual “news” (i.e. something happened and verifiable facts about it were reported)

In 6 months I had blocked every news source provided.

Media is a gimmick for attention, with a veneer of a cause (whatever your cause of choice is).

What’s worse, there is a shared bias about the world within the writer class. Having known the truth of more than a few reported stories by reputable journalist, I was stunned how often what was written had no grounded whatsoever in what actually happened. It was simply an anthology of opinions by people with the credentials to give a viewpoint on a topic they had no personal insight into.

Now that I’ve eliminated media from my diet, I spend far more time investigating and learning.

Just like junk food takes the place of nutrition without providing it, media is narrative without instruction.

This wasn’t always the case. Look at newspaper articles from the 1920s. They are basically Wikipedia articles as told by a friend.

I’m shocked how many otherwise intelligent and well-educated people truly feel they “won’t know what’s going on in the world” without media. Fact check even two or three stories with experts from your personal network. You’ll learn quickly that media isn’t solving that problem and doesn’t deserve the job.

petre• 2 years ago

People concerned with the "news" should read this[1]. By a a playwright and poet who's also a journalist[2] that works at RFI. He wrote a satiric novel about an underground race of rats conspiring with world governments to keep people busy consuming "news" in order to exhaust them and prevent disruption through social movements. It's called the "Preventive disorder". Sadly there's no English or French edition. Excerpt:

"The deadlock of the global society involves world’s radical restructuring based on the control of information, as well as on a systematic maintenance of a “preventive disorder” – which is actually the title of the manifest-novel, written in a journalistic style, about the mediatic order of today –equivalent, in the vision of the writer-journalist Vişniec, with the instauration of a new religion."

  1. https://www.ijcr.eu/articole/116_Pagini%2053-59%20Prus%20IJCR%201-2013.pdf
  2. https://www.visniec.com

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

#2 is pretty silly because to avoid occasionally reporting things that aren’t true, media organizations would have to be omniscient.

“No news service gets everything right 100% of the time” is pretty shallow criticism. Who does?

countWSS• 2 years ago

Trust is misplaced, these media companies are not some unbiased neutral entities: they exist to sell ads and promote some paid PR viewpoints. If you're "trusting" them it means they can exploit this trust for profit, be it commercial or political: just like movie actors do it for money, its an illusion of "being a genuine character" exploited by media personalities to form "public trust".

thisislife2• 2 years ago

I am not surprised and believe this is a deliberate political tactic (by both US political parties) - as the US has outsourced intelligence gathering to BigTech, it is in their interest to kill the old media to push more people to the internet for all media consumption. This allows them to easily track what media you consume, from where and better control what information you can see.

Related: ‘Too many people watched’ – UK MP explains why RT was banned - https://archive.is/urSI2

r721• 2 years ago

Related: ‘Too many people watched’ – UK MP explains why RT was banned

Yeah, let's listen to pro-Kremlin RT commentator on the topic of media freedom /s

parineum2• 2 years ago

This is kinda like the people who want to save democracy by not letting people vote for who they want to.

You can't be pro-press freedom if you're not going to allow biased, dissenting and outright deranged media.

diego_sandoval2• 2 years ago

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all"

Log_out_2• 2 years ago

Not as if the various traditional media outlets were not thoroughly subverted by various powers. Every wannabempireagain had a anti imperialist newspaper, every billionaire owned the "donotmovechangenothing" other half. They of course try to recreate that on the internet, the problem is the angry citizens do no longer want to read that crap,almost as if they had the short end of the stick for decades.

amenhotep2• 2 years ago

UK MP

It is of course in retrospect blindingly obvious that this would be an RT interview with George Galloway, but perhaps future readers can be saved a click.

alejohausner• 2 years ago

The FCC used to have a "fairness doctrine." If a network had a broadcast license, it was required to present controversial issues in a balanced manner, presenting different points of view. This meant that the news segments were boring, not flashy. The news departments of networks were money losers.

The doctrine was abolished in 1987.

The news became much more entertaining. Now you have lots of mud-slinging, bias, and name-calling, and a lot less reasoned debate and thought. Network news departments now make a lot of money.

In order to make more money, you need more advertisers. If you have high-paying advertisers, you can't offend them. That means that there are many topics, especially corporate-funded takeovers of regulatory agencies, which aren't covered at all. You never hear CNN or Fox News talk about the revolving door between the FDA and big pharma, or the USDA and big ag, or between the SEC and big banks, or between defense contractors and the CIA. Neither "left-wing" nor "right-wing" networks wants to talk about that, because it would decrease their profits.

Viewers can sense this. They're not made of stone. That's why they don't trust the media.

(I wrote "left-" and "right-" in quotes, because there aren't any left-wing networks at all, but that's another issue).

delichon2• 2 years ago

I think it's not right to talk about a corporate takeover of the FDA. It was a corporate project to begin with, so there was nothing to take. Big Food lobbied hard for its creation, wrote the legislation, bought the politicians who rubber stamped it, staffed it with friends and stooges from the start, and immediately leveraged it in their own interest. The FDA wasn't so much corrupted as born that way.

I don't know much about the formation of those other agencies so they're probably fine :/.

diego_sandoval2• 2 years ago

I don't know if it's just me, but the feeling I have is that in the last 5 years, mass media has been more shameless in its lies, like they even stopped trying to hide the fact that they are lying. They must know that 20% of their audience is able to completely disprove what they just said with 2 minutes of Googling, but they don't care.

And now that I think of it, that must be exactly the feeling that people have in oppressive regimes: Everyone knows that they're being lied to, but it's just accepted as a fact of life.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

I think they are just catering to biases of their viewer base. The media is no longer in the news reporting business, they are really just catering to reinforcing whatever bias of their customer base is. And maybe that's because traditional media has just gone up in smoke for young people, they have to chase those ad dollars very aggressively.

Argonaut9982• 2 years ago

US media is something else, as if it’s out of Idiocracy. CNN had a COVID death counter (that disappeared once Biden won the election) – it’s comical.

I feel like the jig is up when it comes to the media, ‘citizen journalism’ via apps like Twitter, Instagram etc makes quick work of debunking or exposing biases in mainstream media.

amenhotep2• 2 years ago

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1352638646323720194

I don't feel I can do justice to the irony here.

Argonaut9982• 2 years ago

Eh, I’m not American and I certainly did not see what Carlson said. I do not watch CNN much but I did see before there was a tracker then during the segment after he was elected it was not there. Maybe they just removed it for that one time but nonetheless my bad.

The concept of a COVID death tracker is asinine, that was my ultimate point.

reportgunner• 2 years ago

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

cromwellian• 2 years ago

The media has been nonstop attacked by the political right going all the way back to the 80. It started with talk radio.

Before cable TV News was a loss leader mostly limited to time slots that were the least profitable for commercials and mostly covered headlines.

When 24/7 cable arrived with CNN and then Fox, the filled in time essentially became 23 hours of talking head opinion. Suddenly the critics isolated to talk radio got their own forums.

But what really finally destroyed trust was social media. Now instead of just your uncle telling you to watch Fox, he’s resharing all over FB, and now Post-Musk Twitter.

With the signal to noise ratio going to hell, and one side almost constantly spreading (according to a peer reviewed a Science journal paper recently) significantly more misinformation to their own bubble, is it any wonder trust is declining?

The final nail in the coffin will be AI where deepfakes and bots will make it almost impossible to believe any story.

a_bouncing_bean• 2 years ago

I worked in IT for the last remaining newspaper in a major American city from 2010~12. They were going through a major downsizing, and in that time the reporting staff was cut in half and then almost cut in half again. They were required to increase the number of articles by 3x I think as well. Do you think they spent the same amount of time checking sources and fact checking? What would you do to keep your job if you were 29-year-old journalist in that environment?

deterministic• 2 years ago

That’s great! Most media is nothing but politically motivated propaganda machines owned by billionaires interesting in pushing a specific agenda. So it is excellent that people don’t automatically trust media.

Americans' trust in media plummets to historic low: poll (2023)

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