The media is still operating under a moral authority that it hasn't earned and doesn't have. Americans don't trust the media. They don't think that the media has a clue. And the growing left-wing extremism and disregard for even the most basic facts in the media's fake news machine (backed up by equally fake fact checking attacks on political opponents) is wrecking what little trust is left.
roughly half (51 percent) of Americans said the national political media “is out of touch with everyday Americans,” compared with 28 percent who said it “understand the issues everyday Americans are facing.”
28 percent. That's barely more than a quarter.
That's really bad news when your entire profession is based on an arrogant effort to explain things to Americans... without ever listening to them. Meanwhile the media's effort to constantly call Trump and his people liars has one minor problem.
President Donald Trump, a frequent public antagonist of the press and the first president in 36 years to skip the confab, is also slightly more trusted than the national political media. Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they trusted Trump’s White House to tell the truth, while 29 percent opted for the media.
No one likes the media and no one trusts them. That's the bottom line. It's an arrogant institution that was bad enough in its day, but has now morphed into a left-wing propaganda network of wealthy coastal elites with no concept of the people they are talking to. That's true even of ESPN. The situation is much worse in the general media.
Only 38 percent said they have “a lot” or “some” trust in the media covering Trump’s White House fairly, compared with about half (52 percent) who said they didn’t have much or none at all. Almost half (48 percent) also said they thought the media has been harder on Trump than other past presidential administrations.
Democracy dies in shameless media bias.
But the media also scored low marks among independents, with more than half saying they didn’t trust national news outlets to cover the White House fairly and that they trusted Trump more. Roughly half (49 percent) also said the media was out of touch and 43 percent said outlets had been harder on Trump than other presidents.
Trump’s critiques of the media, which he commonly derides as “fake news” also seems to have struck a chord with Americans. A plurality (42 percent) said they see fake news in national newspapers or network news broadcasts more than once or about once a day. About 3 in 10 (31 percent) said they saw fake news from those sources once every few days, once a week or slightly less often than that.
Punching the media in the face works. We need more of it.