Brendan Karr is Donald Trump's pick to head the FCC. Naturally this means he has to write threatening letters to media outlets Trump has beef with—like ABC:
The letter, which was obtained by CNN, begins, “Dear Mr. Iger, Americans no longer trust the national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly.”
....“My understanding is that ABC is attempting to extract onerous financial and operational concessions from local broadcast TV stations under the threat of terminating long-held affiliations.... “The fact that a massive trust divide has emerged between local news outlets and national programmers like ABC only increases the importance of retransmission consent revenues remaining available for local broadcast TV stations to invest in their local news operations and content that serves their communities,” Carr writes.
This is typical MAGA intimidation, but for about the millionth time I'd like to point out that Carr is wrong about declining trust in the media:
In the post-Fox era, Republicans have lost trust in the mainstream media. Among Democrats, trust has actually gone up a little.
Republicans have spent the past few decades setting their own hair on fire and then pointing out that it's getting a little warm in here. But those of us who stay away from the conservative gas can haven't been affected much. We just smell the burning scalps and wonder why Republicans do this to themselves.
UPDATE: Apparently some conservative site got hold of this and my Twitter feed is now stuffed with MAGA types claiming that I'm a no-good lying liberal asshat. This is because (a) I didn't include independents in the chart and (b) I also didn't include an age breakdown.
Very strange. I didn't include indies because it's well known that nearly all of them are actually partisans but Gallup didn't break that down. I didn't include the age breakdown because . . . why would I? The whole point here is to look at partisan differences.
In any case, as always, I've linked to the source so you can look at anything you want.
"...setting their own hair on fire...."
Good one.
"Republicans have spent the past few decades setting their own hair on fire and then pointing out that it's getting a little warm in here. "
Deserves to be in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
Has it? To my eyes, trust was slowly eroding, although not as steep as Republicans, until Trump was elected, but started slowly eroding again.
I think Democrats' trust in the MSM will drop precipitously after (a) the WaPo, LAT, and others deciding not to make a presidential endorsement; (b) their role in publicizing false equivalence throughout the years but especially ramping it up this year; (c) Time Maga-zine's repeat choice for POTY; (d) and the obsequious bending of the knee by ABC News' parent, Disney.
We're witnessing in real-time just how easy it is for a liberal democracy to turn illiberal on its way towards an autocracy. The MSM has locked its balls away in a box and gifted it to Trump.
If Time Maga-zine were a German outlet in 1939, it'd put Hitler on its cover as POTY with the headline, "Heil? Das!"
Look at the area above and below the dashed line. If anything KD depressed faith in media among Dems.
As for your predictions, yes, scary.
Mine was already declining and fell like a rock during the last election cycle. The MSM knows Trump is unfit, but relentlessly pushed him anyway, and it’s actually getting worse. I used to have multiple MSM subscriptions, but avoid it all like the plague now. They’ve gone all in for fascism, racism and corruption.
Given HItler was Time's Man of the Year in 1938, it is unlikely they would have chosen him again in 1939.
What I'm saying is, given the opportunity for a redo, Time Maga-zine would double down, just as it keeps showing us in the present. Nothing has changed.
As it was then, and is now, democracies collapse, not despite of a principled MSM, but because the MSM is weak. It will participate in the demise of democracies for its self-interest.
So, whom would you have chosen for Person of the Year 2024?
Elon Musk.
Beetlejuice.
It was really his year. A great comeback from the dead story.
Caitlyn Clark
Stalin was Time's man of the year for 1939.
Man/Person of the Year is about effect not good
Meaning, it's not objective; it's a subjective award. They can make anyone or anything POTY, to fit their goals of messaging, n'est pas?
I am not familiar with Fox-based epochs, but per the chart, trust in Mass Media was 60% in 1998. And the last datapoint in the chart it is at 54%
Mk I eyeball, and trend line notwithstanding, and down from a high of perhaps 76% circa 2018. It is also interesting that the trend line for Democrats hits the 1998 datapoint exactly. And... if one finds the source data - https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx - Gallup takes it all the way back to 1972, which paints a rather different one then Kevin's Still Life with Cherries chart.
I’m not one to defend Kevin‘s charts in all cases, but this time I can’t fault him for starting his chart in the year Gallup started asking the question annually rather than drawing conclusions from what happened during they 20 some year gap after the question was first asked during Watergate
If asking annually, the the data starts in 1997 rather than 1998.
Sure, we do not know how things went in the individual years between 1976 and 1997, but it is certainly clear what the end result was, and it suggests a trend which begins well before Kevin's chosen starting point.
I started in news circa 1998 on AM radio, an hourly island of objectivity in a sea of sensationalist outrage. By 2020, most programming was hosts telling listeners not to trust the news at the top of each hour. That year, my station decided to eliminate the news department so the hosts could vent unchallenged.
Human beings love the whole "what they won't tell you" formula. At least a lot of them do.
I think that's behind this, really. If you use public airwaves, you are accountable for what you publish. But if you don't - it's cable or internet - you can lie your ass off. You can even libel people as long as it's micro-targeted and they never find out about it.
Kevin: “we wonder why they do this to themselves”
Well, Republicans have won two of the last three presidencies, and they now have majorities in both the House and Senate, and 6 of 9 Supreme Court Justices.
So there’s your answer. Sadly, ginned up fear and outrage is an electorally winning strategy, it seems.
When you spend most of your time picking BS news outlets for confirmation bias, objective reporting is going to seem pretty biased.
I'm wondering where they found enough viewers/readers/listeners of the "mainstream news" to survey. Doesn't most everybody just see what's on their Facebook feed or the latest xits on Musk's Xitter? And if they don't access "mainstream news", how does their opinion mean anything?
In addition to the partisan divide, it is idiotic to use the term "MSM" when that set includes both the NYT and Fox News.
When someone answers the survey of the "MSM", which outlet are they thinking of?
In addition, there is a lot of nuance to how people view the media outlets.
For example, there are outlets like NYT and Wall Street Journal which have pretty accurate and trustworthy news coverage, but poor-to-awful opinion pages.
Then there are outfits like Fox that don't really even do news coverage as such, and just tag along behind the others when breaking news occurs.
Notice how on social media you see people both liberal and conservative who furiously denounce the NYT, but whenever they want to document a news development, will cite it as an accurate record of what happened.
The reason why this is so important is that demolishing faith in reality is one of the main tactics of fascists to get us to a place where we can believe everything and nothing all at once.
I see a steady and precipitous dropoff in Demoratic faith starting approximately with the 2016 presidential campaign to today. Beating my usual drum, the decline might then coincide with the infotainment media's normalization of Republican and in particular, Trumpian behavior.
The decline persisted past the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and well into the Biden presidency, as Biden was demonized for trivial to imagined "reasons" while Trump's abnormal and disqualifying antics and character were both-sided, culminating in some major news outlets deciding they couldn't see any difference between Joe Biden -- or Kamala Harris -- and the multiply-convicted Republican felon.
At best, my rationale may have been a factor. Obviously, it isn't the whole explanation, because nothing ever is.
And no, I do not have any "citations" for this theory. I haven't read anything by Smart People which agrees. But I also haven't looked.
Republicans are Americans. Democrats are not.
Does his statement make sense now?
I thought it was the other way around...
Oh, wait! That was Mr Drum's statement(s). Yeah, the letter to Iger. If "Americans" have lost faith, and these "Americans" tend to mainly be Republican, then yeah. Kind of.
But Republicans have been insisting Democrats aren't "American" ever since the fall of the old USSR, when they lost their Great Enemy and had to choose a new one, because that's just how the Republican Party rolls.
I'm pretty sure the Republicans didn't consider Democrats American even while the USSR was a thing.
So now it's only 12% of Republicans that have trust in Mass Media.
Siloing is complete. I'm not sure how any democracy can function when there is such a wide difference in understanding. Finding common ground for compromise seems impossible.
Study came out mid October. If I had seen it, I would have had significantly diminished my expectations that Haley Republicans would vote for Harris.
Yes. And Kamala Harris would not have to have pandered to the wingnuts by demonizing immigration at the southern border and promising not to "tax tips." For that matter, she could have even tossed a bone to Americans of Palestinian, Moslem, or Arab heritage and said under her administration, the US would "follow the law."