A recent landmark poll of 20,000 citizens undertaken by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that Americans’ hope for and trust in an objective media is all but lost. They see not only an ever-growing partisanship in news reporting but a determination by the mainstream media to push a political agenda instead of honestly disseminating the news. While generic faith in the media has been gradually declining over recent decades, the precipitous drop in trust and questions about what motivates the mainstream media can be traced to June 2015 and Donald Trump’s entry into the presidential sweepstakes.
This latest Gallup poll is the most devastating indictment of the media in polling history. Some highlights:
84% of surveyed Americans lay either a moderate or a great deal of the blame for today’s partisan hostility at the feet of the media.
Further, 82% believe news outlets are either deliberately “misrepresenting the facts” or are “making them up entirely”.
This is further amplified as 79% of those surveyed say media outlets are trying to persuade people to adopt a certain opinion about an issue or an individual.
Similarly, while the respondents in the poll believe that the media is “critical” or “very important” to democracy, 86% say they have witnessed either a fair amount or a great deal of bias in news reporting. Damningly, 78% feel that this bias is reflected in the spread of fake news which “is a major” problem” that exceeds all other in the mainstream media environment. [emphases added]
By contrast, in 2007 62% of respondents in a Pew Research poll claimed to have witnessed either a fair amount or a great deal of bias in news reporting; in another Pew Research poll in 2012, that result increased slightly to 67% as compared to 86% today. How did the mainstream media sink to this abysmal level of distrust and disdain?
Donald Trump’s entry into the presidential field in 2015 was a godsend to the mainstream media that had been hemorrhaging red ink for many years. The denizens of the mainstream media hierarchies knew that unremitting coverage of Trump, a global celebrity, would dramatically increase viewership, clicks on the internet and newspaper readership and thus their bottom line. Since they were certain Trump had little chance of winning the Republican nomination and his foray into politics was, in all likelihood, a publicity stunt, they thought there was no downside. Moreover, virtually everyone in the mainstream media, from those in the executive suites to recently hired rookie reporters, were convinced it was a near certainty that Hillary Clinton would be the next president regardless of the overwhelming volume of attention paid to Trump.
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http://americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/the_mainstream_media_is_at_the_point_of_no_return.html
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They died a long time ago.