A new Gallup poll reveals that Americans’ confidence in media – both print and on television – has hit “all-time” lows. The numbers are jaw-dropping.
The latest numbers show a 5-point drop for both mediums in the past year. Just 16% have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, while even fewer – a dismal 11% – expressed confidence in television news.
Gallup notes that media has never had particularly high confidence ratings, but the numbers from 1993, when the outfit first added television news to the mix, had a 46% approval for that medium while newspapers sat at 31%.
Newspapers and television have declined a whopping 15% and 35% respectively over the past 30 years.
“Television news and newspapers rank nearly at the bottom” of a list of institutions that saw a decline in confidence, Gallup writes, “with only Congress garnering less confidence from the public than TV news.”
These numbers are almost as low as they can go. Nice! But more than low numbers, the power of the propaganda press to control elections and political outcomes and drive news cycles needs to be constrained. https://t.co/LTSkVBRoap
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 19, 2022
RELATED: CNN’s Don Lemon Demands Media Cover Republicans Differently: They Are A ‘Danger’ To Society
Media Confidence Hits Historic Lows
It’s difficult to understand how even 16 and 11 percent of Americans could possibly have confidence in the media in today’s age.
Every American should see a report in print or on television and immediately start looking for other sources to confirm or verify rather than trusting the lone source.
And even then the news stories should be taken with a grain of salt.
We just saw a four-year cycle in which the media repeatedly pumped a fake Russia scandal into the public consciousness and have watched as they continually hide the many Hunter Biden scandals from that same public.
CNN’s Don Lemon recently said the quiet part out loud – that the media should cover one political party in this country differently than the other.
Bitter Don Lemon lashes out on-air seemingly against new CNN boss Chris Licht as the “people who are in charge of what we…the American press puts out” and decries the desire to treat GOP fairly.
“Republicans are doing something that is very dangerous to our society,” he sneers. pic.twitter.com/jRr7Grz9Q6— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 14, 2022
“We sit around and we talk about these things and we want to give this false equivalence to Democrats and Republicans. That is not where we are right now,” Lemon said. “Republicans are doing something that is very dangerous to our society and we have to acknowledge that.”
He added, “We have to acknowledge that as Americans, we must acknowledge that as journalists because if we don’t, we are not doing our jobs.”
And with good reason! ? https://t.co/G5bYAGhhdu
— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) July 19, 2022
The all-time lows in media confidence come even as journalists, living in an apparent bubble, believe wholeheartedly that they are doing a great job of building confidence.
A recent Pew Research Center poll reveals that 65% of journalists think they do a good job of accurately reporting the news even as the public clearly disagrees.
Our new study of nearly 12,000 U.S. journalists finds that 65% of journalists say news organizations do a very or somewhat good job at reporting the news accurately — 35% of U.S. adults agree. https://t.co/13A20UpII3 pic.twitter.com/cVUNWmct7r
— Jeff Gottfried (@gottfriedjeff) June 16, 2022
Gallup’s poll contrasts the view of journalists significantly.
For just the second time they report, “a majority of Americans, 53%, now say they have very little or no confidence at all in TV news.”
Democrats, according to their numbers, still maintain the highest level of confidence in the two media sources – 35% for newspapers, and 20% for television.
Those ratings, despite the overall downward trend for Americans in general, actually rose among Democrats during the Trump administration, indicating a mindset in which the left desperately wanted to believe what was being peddled during that time.
Even when the media makes an obvious error in their reporting, the corrections sometimes are few and far between and often take a long time to issue. How many months did it take for the Washington Post to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real?
Most recently, the Pulitzer Board rejected calls to rescind awards to the Post and the New York Times for reporting on stories involving their Russia collusion hustle.
Trump scolds Pulitzer Prize Board for standing by 2018 Russiagate honors: ‘Biggest reporting failure’ https://t.co/dhr1XrJN02
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 19, 2022
“The Pulitzer Board has taken away any shred of credibility it had left with its ‘response’ regarding the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, which was awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for blatant fake news,” the former President said in a statement to Fox News.
“Instead of acting with integrity and providing transparency, the Pulitzer Board is running cover for the biggest reporting failure in modern history: the fake Russia Russia Russia collusion hoax.”
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