“Mainstream media outlets in the United States are open, honest and genuine,” said no one ever.
CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS and Fox News aren’t the most reliable of news organizations today. This is why a lot of people turn to the Internet to find the facts and figures of news stories and gather opinions from prominent bloggers. The Internet has effectively destroyed the traditional foundation of the media.
The Media are also complicit in shutting down alternative opinions and trying to create the narrative.
Who could ever forget the famous CBS omission of Ron Paul in a presidential poll during the 2012 election? He was second in a poll and the news outlet blocked out his face and name. It was a slap in the face to transparent journalism and news reporting.
Even Jon Stewart picked up on this at the time.
Unfortunately, news outlets don’t report the news anymore. Instead, they talk about the news, mostly from a left-leaning stance, and try to become the news story. This perhaps is what’s actually hurting media institutions everywhere.
According to a new Gallup poll, Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low.
The survey of 1,025 respondents found that just 40 percent of Americans maintain “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in the media to report the news accurately, fairly and in great detail.
This represents an immense decline from the high of 55 percent in the late-1990s, when Gallup had started this kind of polling.
When looking at the demographics, younger Americans are the most distrustful of the media. The poll found that only a little more than one-third (36 percent) of Americans 18 to 49 had trusted the media. Nearly half (45 percent) of Americans over 50 trust the media to be accurate and fair. Democrats are also more likely to trust the media than Republicans, 54 percent compared to 32 percent, respectively.
Interestingly, the decline in the trust in media is similar to the drop in trust in government and United States institutions.
With that being said, Gallup noted that scandals plaguing news organizations, like Brian Williams at NBC, have also contributed to this decline in trust.
The online landscape provides a plethora of alternative news outlets, opinions, podcasts, ideas, blogs and much more. Sure, there’ll always be a need for the Associated Press or Reuters, but it seems many can do without the CNNs and MSNBCs of the world.
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