On Twitter a couple of days ago Nate Silver pointed out that confidence in the press has plummeted. This is true, but I added that confidence in everything has plummeted. The press wasn't any kind of outlier.
But then I wondered if I was remembering that correctly. So I went off to the General Social Survey and checked over a long time period:
In fact, confidence in the press is an outlier. The share of people saying they have at least some confidence in the press has dropped from 75% to 48%.
But that's not the whole story. Here's confidence in the press by political party:
The drop in confidence is due almost entirely to Republicans, and the partisan gap started right around 2000—precisely when Fox News started to build an audience—and accelerated in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president. This is no coincidence.
So it's not quite right to say that "Americans" have lost confidence in the press. Only Republicans have.
POSTSCRIPT: Why does the second chart go up only to 2018? That's an excellent question.
Until a couple of weeks ago all the GSS charts went up to 2022. But then, for some reason, all the recent data suddenly got dropped and the charts ended at 2018. This isn't because the data doesn't exist. I can search for variables individually, extract the raw data, and then calculate percentages manually. That's how I did the top chart. But in the trend charts that NORC provides—which include things like partisan breakdowns—2018 is the end.
I have no idea what happened. I tried to contact them via their form, but it wouldn't let me. I tried to send an email, but it bounced back. It is a mystery.
While I trust to a reasonable degree the news that the major media report is reasonably accurately represented, I most certainly no longer trust their social reporting, where the reporters values and desires are all too evident in their writing. I am tied of hearing of virtues of polyamory and open marriages - we went through that insanity 50 years ago with communes and related experiments - which overall did not work out well, particularily for children. I saw lots of marriages break up in the aftermath. Similarily, I am tired of the outrage over bad schools. I and my sibs went to some of those bad schools - Paul Junior High in NW DC in the mid 60's and Pimlico High School in the late 60's. Paul was a bad school - not because of the facility or teachers, but because of the students. Pimlico was not a good school, once again because of the students. I got beat up more times than I remember. We left DC when they dropped college prep classes. Baltimore was an improvement but my sister and her friends still got groped more times than they can remember. Schools are a reflection of the students who attend, not the creation of the administration.
What press have you been reading or news shows you've been watching that are touting the "virtues" of polyamorous relationships? I can't say I've ever seen this -- outside of certain political scandals -- and I'm a bit of a news junkie.
I don't think that the live links are coming through, but here:
New York magazine cover feature
this piece in the New York Times
there were a slew of additional articles published about polyamory this week in the NY Post, USA Today, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal
The open marriage poly stuff keeps coming back.
My own view is that it is a social countersignaling strategy - the behavior pattern is destructive and you basically need a lot of wealth to have a change of pulling it off. But almost all of the less wealthy followers / challengers will be destroyed, so it is a destructive social competition game.
URLs and links are permitted, but not as the opening text of a comment. You can have all the same overall text, but if the URL is first, the comment will be rejected. Put the "regular" text first and it will be fine.
At least that is my experience.
thanks
A writer named Molly Roden Winter wrote a book about her open marriage. The publisher released the book on January 16th and did a lot of marketing. I mostly don't read "social reporting," so like you I had no idea until I searched on DuckDuckGo.
The dating networks may be pushing this to boost subscriptions as well, as they can reasonably hope that they will be paid to be the middleman.
I absolutely agree with your main point about social reporting.
Well, far too much US reporting rathers seems to be of the nature "Young urban uni educated journalist talks to small(ish) set of contacts largely drawn from highly similar socio-economic circles and then writes article extrapolating from a biased sample into large national / general trend" - generally an innumerate English literature educated or general studies innummerate approach....
But low cost and given the conomics of click-baiting, one has to understand the market - i.e. the audiencies (notably online) drive
This.
I now consider myself a democrat ( reformed Republican) and I have very little confidence in the press these days. Very discouraging.
I've been beating the Fox News Is Bad For America drum for many years. I wish the general press would inform the non-Fox audience what's going on over there, but they rarely do unless it's an exceptional story, like the Dominion lawsuit.
I have been beating the “mainstream media is destroying democracy” since the 90s when the NY Times allowed itself to be used as a mouthpiece for far right political operatives out to destroy Clinton’s presidency. The Times’s reporter Jeff Gerth was allowed to print article after article full of lies and misleading facts about the failed Whitewater development project, Filegate, Travelgate, Chinagate, etc. Since these claims were published by the august NY Times, the “newspaper of record” other media outlets followed its lead.
Gerth was fed these facts by operatives involved in Richard Mellon Scaife’s Arkansas Project. Gerth’s Times editors allowed him to print their phony claims without due diligence. Even worse when the far right then peddled the vicious, cruel slander that the Clintons had murdered their close friend Vince Foster and spent millions of our tax dollars on multiple investigations of that insane claim, the mainstream media did not react with anywhere near the appropriate level of outrage.
The media later justified their malpractice by pointing to the fact that Clinton then cheated on his wife. To this day journalists frequently dismiss Clinton as sleazy or smarmy, terms I have never seen any of them apply to the far more promiscuous and wildly reckless JFK with his affairs with mob boss Sam Giancana’s mistress and an East European who was suspected of being a spy.
And then there was the media’s disdainful treatment of Al Gore and their love affair with Dubya because he was “more fun to have a beer with”.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/10/gore200710
Steve Bannon was right when he said that rightwing media serves to keep the base “energized” — i.e. angry — but it’s the mainstream “liberal” media that does the real damage to Democrats. It was Bannon’s partner at Breitbart and the Government Accountabiliyt Institut, Peter Schweitzer, who created both the false accusations against the Clinton Foundation that did so much damage to Hillary’s campaign and the Biden Ukraine “scandal”.
I would expect an "outlier" to have no neighbors. But it seems to have three - Government, Supreme Court, and Congress. Do those share the same political breakdown as Press?
Looking at that data: https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/454/vshow it would seem there are only three "answers" for the confidence-in question:
"A Great Deal"
"Only Some"
and
"Hardly Any"
And yet... there also seems to be an "Inapplicable" row there, which for recent years has been either first or second highest...
If Fox News is “the press” then yes, my confidence has plummeted. Political “reporting” sucks so very much.
No, Republican confidence didn't start dropping in 2000. It was at about 52% in 1993 and about 49% in 2014. The big drops in the graph were after 1990 and after 2014.
Gingrich, Fox News, Trump have probably all had an effect. Republicans have been complaining about the "liberal" MSM for a long time. This survey is probably not precise enough to really identify particular turning points, though the separation of parties must be real. When it comes to polls, which are typically of about a thousand people, over-interpretation is normal.
I would suggest unfollowing Nate Silver.