The media trust gap between conservatives and liberals continues to grow. Here's why
Category: News & Politics
Via: drakkonis • 3 years ago • 21 commentsBy: Joe Concha, Opinion Contributor (MSN)
Not much I can add to that.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The polarized views on just about every political and cultural issue in America have been underscored again in a new study from the non-partisan Pew Research Center. The study reveals a Grand Canyon-sized gap between Republican and Democratic perspectives on the national news media.
© iStock The media trust gap between conservatives and liberals continues to grow. Here's why
Just five years ago, 70 percent of Republicans said they had at least some trust in national news organizations. In 2021, that share has been cut in half, with just 35 percent feeling the same way.
Meanwhile, Democrats are peachy keen on what they're seeing and hearing from the national news media, with 78 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents saying they have "a lot" or "some" trust in the Fourth Estate nationally. When breaking down the numbers between self-identified liberals and conservatives, the gap widens to 53 points. Eighty-three percent of liberal Democrats have at least some trust in the national media, while just 30 percent of conservative Republicans do.
Pew's findings aren't an outlier. A 2020 deep dive from Gallup showed that Democrats trust in the media approached record highs during the Trump presidency, while among GOP voters it fell to an all-time low.
I asked longtime media observer and 14-time Emmy-winning journalist Bernie Goldberg what's behind these numbers.
Goldberg explained that the reason Democrats and liberals trust the mainstream media is that their values are reflected by said media. So, if you're a liberal and see your liberal values masquerading as straight news, you're perfectly happy.
The reason conservatives aren't happy is that most of the news comes from liberal news organizations, said the author of the 2001 New York Times bestseller "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News."
"Almost all of the major news organizations have a liberal slant to their coverage of stories, and certainly on their editorial page," he explained. "So, Republicans and conservatives see bias. And liberals see honesty. But liberals are wrong, and conservatives are right, in this particular case."
To Goldberg's point, for conservatives, the sentiment you hear is consistent: Too many journalists incorporate their own opinions and biases into straight news reporting. And since most of the national political media is based in Manhattan (very liberal) and Washington, D.C. (extremely liberal), it's almost impossible for conformity and groupthink not to steer the perspectives left by those who seem to have gotten into the business not to report but to advocate.
The recent Reporting on the new Texas abortion law is a prime example of advocacy in action, as noted in an op-ed published by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "Texas Abortion Law Leads To Emotional Media Moments in a Busy News Day," reads its headline before noting CNN anchor Kate Bolduan's report on the new law.
"[It] led to some emotional moments in the media coverage, including this from CNN's Kate Bolduan," Poynter notes. "She opened 'At This Hour' by saying, 'Let's just be real. The very same people in the very same state who say, 'Don't you dare tell me to wear a mask,' the same people who say that is government overreach because it violates individual freedoms - those very same people clearly are saying now, 'Never mind when it comes to my body and the medical decisions that I make with the advice of my doctor. Now that choice is totally fair game, apparently, to be taken out of my hand and dictated now by a bunch of politicians.' That is hypocrisy. This is hypocrisy, the definition of."
Note: Bolduan is not an opinion host or pundit. She is the anchor of a daytime news program. Yet there she was, hammering home her feelings on the matter with lots of emotion and no ambiguity.
Any conservatives or independents who were watching may not have enjoyed being lectured to, either. According to Gallup, 49 percent of American adults consider themselves "pro-choice," while 47 percent say they're "pro-life." In 2019, just 46 percent called themselves "pro-choice" while 49 percent identified as "pro-life." (And in case you're wondering, despite how the issue is often presented, women and men hold almost identical views on abortion.)
If the goal is to alienate half your audience on an issue, this is a textbook way to accomplish that.
Many hyperbolic reactions could be found on Twitter, too.
Texas turned back the clock not just 50 years to Roe v Wade (1973) but nearly 140 years to the enactment of the KKK Act (1883). - Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 1, 2021
Who is gonna invade Texas to liberate women and girls - Karen Nicole Attiah (@KarenAttiah) September 2, 2021
Welp we're about 12 hrs till Texas' 6 week abortion ban takes effect. An emergency petition is at SCOTUS & if the Justices don't act they will have effectively reversed Roe on the shadow docket. I can honestly say that in 10 years as a repro journalist I don't know what's next. - Jessica Mason Pieklo (@Hegemommy) August 31, 2021
It wasn't always this way, of course. Back in 1976 and the post-Watergate reporting era - the days of Cronkite and Brinkley and Mudd - 63 percent of Republicans trusted the media "a great deal" or a "fair amount," compared to 72 percent of independents and 77 percent of Democrats. A tiny gap compared to today.
Today, most political journalists hold liberal views and vote for and give money to liberal political candidates.
Most conservatives don't trust the media. Most Democrats do. With studies and analyses like these, it's easy to see why.
Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist for The Hill.
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Pretty much covers it.
Not too many years ago I made the afternoon 'rounds' of CNN, MSNBC, ABC or NBC, and FOX.
I remember big Ed What's-his-name calling some female politician a 'slut' on air.
I gradually gave them all up except Fox, because of the extreme bias and lies.
Gave up the Sunday morning shows for the same reasons
That says a whole lot more about where you were coming from than them.
"Ed" was a piece of shit that eventually was cancelled as he should have been and demoted to Epik.com.
That's generally the way most moderate, independent leaning companies operate.
Not promoting Fox opinion shows as factual every week until someone sues them,
then declaring that no one should take Sean or Tucker seriously...
Great argument Greg.
Sean is right. Fox, NewsMax, OAN, are great TV news sources and Town Hall is a great radio news source. Breitbart, CNS, WND, are awesome internet news sources while American Thinker and PJMedia are great opinion sites.
The MSM has given up any pretense it had towards objectivity, essentially functioning as the PR wing for the Democratic Party. The examples of their unprofessional bias are legion at this point. Twitter, for all the harm it's done our national discourse at least has put paid to the notion that journalists are objective professionals. They've exposed their bias, if nothing else.
US media is owned by a few billionaires. I suspect we get the "news" that makes them money and keeps them in control.
Well when the majority of the mainstream network and cable news channels repeat the Democrat’s talking points verbatim only a fool wouldn’t see the bias.
And yet fools seed BS here from Questionable websites daily if not hourly
while similarly minded ass hats complain about what the majority of news sites across the planet print from the BBC and
other English, French and Hebrew speaking companies publish.
You should invest in Ostrich farms.
That applies to both the left and right.
Again applies to both the left and right.
And that is your conclusion? A personal attack?
It could apply to both, but in alllllll my years of doing this and checking that, it is predominantly one sided.
So much so that one or two NT seeders think they are actually winning some sort of award points
by deliberately seeking out biased trash articles from ONLY Questionable Sources.
One brags about it as his crusade to annoy 'secular progressives'.
Hardly. Not a word from the left when their articles are locked & removed for bad sourcing.
our special conservatives bitch daily about being victimized.
How is investment advice a personal attack?
From an unrated business site carried by a Questionable one. ( Oh the irony. )
I can pretty much guarantee that anyone with such a ranch/farm would be way too busy to waste time on NT.
I for one find it hilarious when some folks, based on copious empirical evidence, are clearly biased and try to act like they are some kind of unbiased authority on this topic or that.
The only person they are really fooling is themself.
Funny
Right back at you, tree planter, lol.
Exactly. Couldn’t have said it better. Right on!
Exactly! Well said and so right on. I couldn’t have said it any better.
Aw don't be that way ..... just because i just hit you with the truth.
Let go of that hate ..... hate is the path to the dark side [deleted]
And they have the party line fact checkers to back their own media up and denigrate our media.
For years now I've been telling this story. Back in 1957-58 I was the editor-in-chief of my university's weekly newspaper. Year after year it won the award for being Canada's best weekly university newspaper. (The Ryersonian was a daily student newspaper at Toronto's Ryerson college where professional journalism was taught and it usually won the award for best daily newspaper). Our model for both content and format was The Christian Science Monitor. Back then TCSM won almost annually the award given for the most unbiased newspaper in North America, and it was truly unbiased. Since then it seems to me that there is no longer such a thing as unbiased media. Even The Christian Science Monitor has leaned left.
So everyone is on their own to determine what is actual fact and not twisted by the reporting. I have been able to detect a lot of the tricks that are used by the media to twist a story to fit their bias. An example I have already described here was the reporting during an Israeli-Gaza conflict. A headline read "Israeli Soldiers Kill 3 Gazan Protesters". Most people don't bother to read much farther, and so the medium has successfully planted prejudice in the minds of the readers. However, my knowing the technique that news stories are written so that the paragraphs report the most important information in the first paragraph, reducing the importance as you read down the paragraphs (for a specific purpose, because often a story must be cut shorter to fit the page), when one took the time to read down to the third paragraph of the Israel-Gaza story, one learned that the Gazans had broken through the border fence and were tossing grenades and shooting at the Israeli soldiers from up close. Similar reporting was more recent, when the media headlined that Israel fired rockets into Gaza, NOT indicating until down farther in the story that Israel was retaliating for the rockets that Hamas had first fired into Jerusalem.
Not many members of NT are willing to look at and consider the other side of a story. They hear or read one side and that's it, baby, On my first day in law school, the dean gave us the first lecture. What he said to us was if we were incapable or unwilling to learn the case that our opponent will be arguing against us as well as our own, we might just as well walk out that door and quit law school today. I have never forgotten that lesson, and although I live it today, I have been crucified on this site for following that advice - for looking at both sides now (thank you Joni).
Bias is here to stay, I'm afraid - I'm sure there will be no more Walter Cronkite, whom everyone trusted, and no more Paul Harvey who told the REST of the story. We are going to live our lives in a world of fictionalization, rather than learning facts. ( "Just the facts, ma'am." )
What made Walter Cronkite the most trusted communicator in America
Great symbolism .... very appropriate, one is on the left and one is on the right .... spot on jbb ... spot on
So the question that needs to be asked is, 'Why the sudden change?"
It is not enough to note that trust has changed and then blame the media for misreporting the news, which is what the article does. Certainly, under the nonstop onslaught of Trump and minions falsely calling them "fake news" on a daily basis, the members of the press must have felt some urge to push back and so concentrated their reporting more on the things that would show Trump et.al. to be the one who was, in deed and in fact, to be lying.
Bias in the mainstream journalistic outlets has not substantially changed in the five years. The editorial staff and positions of the major news media have not, for the most part, changed, and the relative bias of the same has remained constant. If you look at the graphs above, it becomes immediately apparent that 1) There has been a decline in trust of the media across the board, and 2) These declines are mirrored across the political spectrum, and 3) These declines happened at times when political turmoil was highest, ie., BLM protests and the 2020 election and ensuing big lie.
So, it would seem that the republicans who believed, contrary to all available data, that the BLM protests were all riots and that the lies that Trump and others in his sphere told about the election make up the difference. This 30-35% of Republicans have been consistent across many surveys that I have seen and represent a group of people who, IMO, are in denial of basic truth. We will welcome you back to reality any time you wish to see the truth.
And I didn't even need to ask anybody to interpret these very easy to decode numbers, I just used my brain and the available data.