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.
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]. ........ Read More @ American Thinker
Do the Media Even Exist?
The media exists in name only but not in fact
If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away. The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well. We also expect officials to leak one-sided stories and then the media to print them without edits. These are all things baked into the media cake and the public understands, even if it does not quite accept them. ....... Read More
Brief History of Fake News
Chronology of Manipulating Public Perception
In 1835 the NY Sun published a 6 part series detailing the discovery of life on the moon. In 1850 a number of newspapers in the United States reported on a plot hatched by Southerners to leave the Union and confederate with Mexico, it turned out to be 100% false. In 1862 news reports initiating in a Nevada newspaper reported the discovery of a petrified human being - the story turned out to be a work of fiction written by a struggling young writer named Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain. In 1874, the New York World announced the discovery of man-eating trees.
Fake News has been a fact of life for decades. In 1932 Walter Duranty of the NY Times received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union published in June 1931. He was criticized then and later for his denial of widespread famine (1932) in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine. Years later, there were calls to revoke his Pulitzer; The New York Times, which submitted his work for the prize in 1932, wrote that his articles constituted 'some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.' ... Read More
