Sunday, October 27, 2024

Americans’ Justified Media Mistrust

"Such blatant bias from the media suggests a once respected institution has little if any standing left."

 J.T. Young  

"America’s establishment media loves to hide behind the First Amendment. However, there can be no freedom of the press if there is no freedom in the press.  No greater blow is being struck for such a freedom than Americans’ tuning out of the establishment media."

 "Recent polling shows Americans’ mistrust of establishment media at an all-time high. The only surprise is that it isn’t higher. America’s establishment media bias is so consistent that they clearly no longer just cover the news from one side, but for one side.

"Gallup recently released a poll (10/14) showing that “trust in the fourth estate — the mass media — is at a new low.” Less than one-third of Americans (31%) expressed “‘a great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly.’” In contrast, almost seven in ten Americans have “no trust at all in the media” (36%) or “not very much” confidence (33%) in the media.

"Gallup’s question was not a new one. Back in the 1970s, America’s confidence in the media was 68%-72%.  Even in the late 1990s and early 2000s, trust ranged between 51-55%. Today, Gallup finds “the news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic political institutions.”

"Far from being merely a perception problem, the establishment media’s faults run far deeper. The Media Research Center has long cited numerous polls finding “journalists are much more liberal than rest of America” and that this liberal advantage is growing. These journalists report the way they lean with “most of the journalistic elite offering reflexively liberal answers to practically every question a pollster can imagine.”

"A 2022 Syracuse University survey showed that only 3.4 percent of American journalists say they are Republicans. And this summer, the Media Research Center found media coverage of Kamala Harris had been 84 percent positive, while Trump’s had been 89 percent negative.

"Certainly, Americans don’t need polls to tell them about establishment media bias; case after case exists.  There was the Russian dossier that was breathlessly reported on and used for extensive investigations by Congress. It turned out the FBI should never have undertaken a Trump-Russia probe.  Then there was case of Hunter Biden’s laptop that was treated as a hoax; only to turn out to be true and a key piece of evidence in his trial — in which he was convicted on all three charges." . . .

J.T. Young is the author of the new book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company.

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