Maybe No One Trusts the Media Because Of All the Lies

It’s a mystery.

The New Yorker goes where every elite media pub has gone before and asks the big question.

When Americans Lost Faith in the News

You know where this begins, as usual, in the lost Eden when everyone trusted the media.

With Trump, all that changed. Trump is rude. Cordiality is not a feature of his brand. And there is no coöperation in the Trump world, because everything is an agon. Trump waged war on the press, and he won, or nearly won. He persuaded millions of Americans not to believe anything they saw or heard in the non-Trumpified media, including, ultimately, the results of the 2020 Presidential election.
The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means.

Ponder the deranged claims that the media makes against Trump. Almost personally going to war against him. calling the media liars is “censorship”. But When the media calls its political opponents liars is that censorship? Then again the media actively calls for censorship of its opponents.

Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent.

Why? Maybe it’s the constant non-stop lies.

The level of media trust steadily declined since 1976. By the 90s, it was at 50 percent. Aside from occasional dives into the 40s, it tended to stay there in the oughts until 2008.
What happened in 2008? Obama. The media whored out whatever shreds of its credibility to launch a full-scale cult of personality campaign for Obama.

Under Obama, media trust dipped to 40 and by 2016 hit 32.
Louie could have told New Yorker readers this rather than pretending that Trump arrived and somehow brainwashed the public into not trusting the media. The statistics are there. But the media can’t help lying.

And then it wonders why no one has any faith in the news.

Here, let me help you guys out.

“Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust” – Leonard Downie Jr / Washington Post:

The only ones those newsrooms build trust with people who agree with them.

While the New Yorker repeats the same old cliches, the media is suffering with both sides of the political spectrum. Having abandoned even the pretense of objectivity, the right openly hates the media, centrists distrust it as a partisan organ and for many lefties the media is insufficiently biased.

Everyone hates the media and no one trusts it. Everyone expects it to repeat its propaganda and hates it when it doesn’t.
And the media did that to itself when it decided to turn into an echo chamber for a guy named Barry.
I don’t know if there’s a way back. Colbert’s old producer at CNN claims he’s trying, but I’m not so sure our society even has a way back.

And most of the media isn’t bothering. It’ll just dust off the old lies and repeat them again while insisting that it needs to be even more biased. Back to Louie at the New Yorker.

“In the memoir slash manifesto “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s), Margaret Sullivan argues that objectivity is not so much impossible today as meaningless, and that the press ought to stop striving to achieve it. The events of 2020 and 2021 showed that the press’s values were in the wrong place. “The extreme right wing had its staunch all-in media allies,” she writes. “The rest of the country had a mainstream press that too often couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do their jobs. Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy.”
The problem is the media is too objective and not biased enough. When all it does is scream through a megaphone, “OUR POLITICAL ENEMIES ARE EVIL AND MUST BE BUTCHERED IN THE STREETS” 24 hours a day, then finally public trust in the media will be restored.
“The power of the press, such as it is, is like the power of academic scholars, scientific researchers, and Supreme Court Justices. It is not backed by force. It rests on faith: the belief that these are groups of people dedicated to pursuing the truth without fear or favor. Once they disclaim that function, they will be perceived in the way everyone else is now perceived, as spinning for gain or status.”
The lack of self-awareness is truly astounding. But if they were self-aware, they wouldn’t be the media.
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