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Gallup: Big Media’s underwater trust numbers.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  September 29th, 2010 at 11:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Add me to the list (Ed Morrissey and Andrew Malcolm) of people unsurprised at the Gallup report that trust in the media is at its lowest in… forever. 57/43 distrust/trust, for those keeping track: and it’s only been in the last few years that the media’s been underwater.

It’s interesting to compare the two reactions to it represented in the above links.  Ed, who is a New Media type who has expanded into radio and print, pins this long-term shift onto the outrageous attempt in 2004 by the media to smear the President with fake documents (an attempt so clumsy that a child* could see through it).  Andrew, who is a print journalist who has taken quite happily to New Media, instead waxes hysterically sarcastic on the very idea that people don’t take the mainstream media seriously:

According to that fringe polling outfit named Gallup, a record 57% of Americans profess little or no trust in this country’s mass media to report the news fairly and accurately.

[snip]

They could have put it another way: An amazing more than four out of 10 Americans (43%) may perhaps believe most everything they read in the news or see on television.

But no, Gallup has to go for the sensational, to feed this crazy belief among a few hundred million Americans that the media is somehow biased in its presentation of the people and happenings that go on all over this crazy place.

Andrew, in between throwing up pictures of American flags and Abraham Lincoln, goes on to reinforce his point that if anybody is surprised at the thought that people consider the media unbalanced, they shouldn’t be: it’s not like there’s a lack of evidence.  The portrayal of THAT WOMAN alone can, and did, fill a post.

For myself, I think that while the 2004 and the 2008 election are both important watershed events, not enough attention is paid to the 2006 election.  To put it simply: the media really wanted the Democrats to win.  They threw everything that they could, at every Republican that they could; and while I won’t pretend that the GOP caucus at the time didn’t enthusiastically participate in its own demise neither will I let the media off the hook for their own enthusiasm in sensationalizing the election cycle.  I suspect that the aftermath of that is when a large part of the population permanently soured on regular media outlets.

Frankly, that’s when I did.

Moe Lane (Crosspost)

*Or even Charles Johnson.

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COMMENTS

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  • cwilson

    The WaPo ran more than 100 articles on the terrible racism implicit in George Allen’s use of the word, between Aug 11, 2006 and the election — including, IIRC, 18 straight days of front page, above-the-fold coverage.

    Even Howard Kurtz had to admit the double standard, when a similar incident occurred this year with Bob Etheridge (D-WhoCares):

    By minimizing this footage of a Democratic congressman, most news organizations have enabled their critics to charge once again that they have a double standard.

    ‘Course, Howie’s own WaPo ONLY report on the Etheridge incident was a throwawy item at the end of an article in the Style section, about “The Real Housewives of D.C.”

  • nepanyrush

    According to the Gallup poll, 51% of liberals think that the media is not biased toward liberal or conservative views, but is “just about right”. 40% of moderates also think it is “just about right.” On the other hand, 73% of conservatives think the media is too liberal and only 17% think it is just about right. That in itself is a indication of just how liberal the media is, when so many liberals and moderates think it is fine, but conservatives recognize that their viewpoint is being discriminated against.

    Democrats also have a high trust in media (59%) whereas a mere 32% of Republicans express trust in the media. That also shows just how pleased Democrats and liberals are with the media and its rather obvious bias toward their points of view.

  • baserunr

    we are treated to NBC’s EDU-thon, which is as close to cost-free commercial airtime for the POTUS and his regime and policies as you can get.

    But there is no double standard. You all remember the EDU-thon that NBC did for President Bush’s NCLB, right?

    That the numbers are only 57/43 is a surprise…

  • jb13

    I’m going to have to throw a flag on this line of reasoning. I agree that the media is biased towards the left, and heavily so.

    But to state that just because only 32 percent of Republicans express trust in the media, compared to 59 percent of Democrats, necessarily proves that to be so, is just not true.

    For instance: In 2008, Gallup released a survey showing that 51 percent of white Americans believed racism was widespread. The same survey showed that 78 percent of black Americans believed that to be the case. Does that mean that racism against blacks is widespread? I mean, after all, by a difference of 27 percentage points, more blacks believe racism is prevalent than do whites. But is that enough? Of course not.

    Likewise, I’m not willing to say the results of this survey “prove” media bias, so much as they instead demonstrate perceptions of bias. Sometimes perceptions match reality. Sometimes they don’t. But a perception, in and of itself, proves nothing.

  • Chris

    I’ve claimed for years that all our problems are caused by a lying media. Due to other sources of information outside of the big 3, The People are starting to wake up.

    We need all of the conservative “talking heads” to acknowledge the damage caused by a lying media, past and present, with honest and truthful examples on a daily basis. Then, as the people learn how they have been uses and manipulated, the ripple will become a wave and Big Media’s ratings will plunge even more.

    As I stated on my post at,

    http://www.redstate.com/aggiepilot88/2010/09/24/our-true-enemy/

    “Unless we want to settle for temporary changes or fixes, treating the symptoms, we must reign in the lying media, the disease. We must keep the Founders thoughts and beliefs in mind. The Creator?s gift to man, the ability to think and reason, combined with a free press that provides the truth and facts to the people, will allow the majority of the people to always choose the proper path. The secret is in an honest and truthful press, or media!”

    We must get this message to the people.

    Chris

  • Chris

    I’ve claimed for years that all our problems are caused by a lying media. Due to other sources of information outside of the big 3, The People are starting to wake up.

    We need all of the conservative “talking heads” to acknowledge the damage caused by a lying media, past and present, with honest and truthful examples on a daily basis. Then, as the people learn how they have been uses and manipulated, the ripple will become a wave and Big Media’s ratings will plunge even more.

    As I stated on my post at,

    http://www.redstate.com/aggiepilot88/2010/09/24/our-true-enemy/

    “Unless we want to settle for temporary changes or fixes, treating the symptoms, we must reign in the lying media, the disease. We must keep the Founders thoughts and beliefs in mind. The Creator?s gift to man, the ability to think and reason, combined with a free press that provides the truth and facts to the people, will allow the majority of the people to always choose the proper path. The secret is in an honest and truthful press, or media!”

    We must get this message to the people.

    Chris

  • http://www.scragged.com petrarch

    The media has told left-biased half-truths for as long as most of us have been alive. For most of that time, they have been very difficult to demonstrate or prove, and visible only to the highly aware and connected.

    In the last ten years, though, the media has started telling flat-out, provable, transparent lies – the Bush fake-document scandal being merely the most famous. And thanks to Fox and the internet, ordinary people actually start hearing about these, which makes them more alert and erodes their trust.

    Suddenly, they start seeing the bias that was always there but which they never noticed before, and trust collapses.

    If the media had stuck to half-truths, they’d still be powerful and trusted. They overreached, as the left seems to always do, and we really need to be thankful for that – otherwise, displacing them would be near-impossible instead of almost inevitable.