U.S. Trust in Media Hits New Low

Our betters are very disappointed in us

Continuing to catch-up in the aftermath of our storms out here, we have Americans Have the Lowest Trust in News in the World from The Liberal Patriot (AKA John Halpin), in which he goes over a newly released study Digital News Report 2022 from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and YouGov.

It claims to have interviewed 93,000 people in 46 "markets" around the world (quotes around markets because its not clear to me exactly what is meant by that) about their attitudes towards news & the media and Halpin is particularly concerned with Americans' responses:

"Only 26 percent of Americans express general trust in the news—tied for the lowest level of trust in the world…" "More than 4 in 10 Americans say they limit news consumption or avoid it altogether."

None of this should come as a surprise: Gallup reported just last autumn that "Americans' Trust In Media Remains Near Record Low". What jumped out at me about this post in particular was Halpin's unwillingness to get to grips with why that might be. Instead he seems disappointed in us, the American public: "these findings show that America is nearly alone in the world in terms of the unwillingness of its citizens to either trust or rely on the news within any kind of consensus framework." "Americans increasingly inhabit their own news bubbles—or don’t take in any news whatsoever—even as more and more people pipe off online and on social media with firm opinions about every development in life. Consequently, citizens know less about what is going on in the country overall and tend to only trust other people—journalists, politicians, or other citizens—who think and believe as they do."

He tip-toes up to causes: "restoring trust in news is probably as difficult as restoring trust in government. But our media and political elites need to take these projects seriously and be far more conscious about what they say, how they say it, and where they say it."

Ahem. Let's review just a few recent events that might help elucidate the problem:

Let us begin with "Russiagate"– the years-long mass-hysteria in which nearly every major U.S. media outlet claimed to believe that Donald Trump was a Russian "asset". Jeff Gerth recently chronicled this in detail in a four-part series beginning here, continuing here & here and ending-up here in which he says "

05/15/23 08:02