Media trust hits new low (opens in new tab)

> How it works: Media outlets can continue to report reliable facts, but that won't turn the trend around on its own. What's needed is for trusted institutions to visibly embrace the news media.

This is an extremely weird and disturbing conclusion. Orwellian even.

What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.

That’s unlikely to happen with existing brands that have effectively now chosen a side, because they have cultivated an audience that now expects them to keep delivering.

It might happen with something new.

> Reversing the decline is a monster task — and one that some journalists and news organizations have taken upon themselves. They're going to need help — perhaps from America's CEOs.

Is this a bad joke? Distrust of media is largely brought about because it is (mostly) in the private sector and therefore always puts the sustainability of its business model above objective reporting. We've known for a while now that negative news sells, clickbait sells, and media organizations are all too happy to push it out there if it helps their struggling bottom line.

Um, no. You gain people's trust by being consistently worthy of trust.

This article seems to think that trust is it's own fungible but inconvertible substance (the media has lost theirs, so someone else needs to give them some), rather than something that derives from an objective reality.

This article doesn't even remotely go where you think it would if you're going off the headline and your preconceptions.

Ends up as

> CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure.

Who's trusting most CEOs?

Being charitable, I guess people are trusting people who are actually able to put money into their hands and food on their table, rather than people who make promises or give abstract benefits or who take money from them?

So their solution to the declining trust in government and media is to leverage the trust that employees still have in their CEOs. If they can convince CEOs to push their false narratives, then trust will evaporate there as well. How about instead: be more trustworthy.

> Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that "our goal should go beyond merely putting truthful information in front of the public. We should also do our best to make sure it’s widely accepted."

This attitude here, is a source of the problem by itself. If traditional media outlets would just put truthful information out without trying to get it "accepted," that would go a long way in rebuilding trust.

When you are aware of the ground situation and see articles in the Washington Post that are clearly completely false, misleading, and spinning facts with a clear purpose of advancing a narrative, (and trying to be "accepted"? by whom?) that completely destroys any remaining trust that you might have built up over the years.

For a long time my model of the world assumed a certain level of corruption to exist in the West, but I assumed it was generally local, and that any large-scale corruption would become a national scandal, like the Church Committee, or Watergate. Basically I had expected an equal balance of justice to match the crime. I no longer hold that. There is deep corruption everywhere - through the media, to government, academia, tech, and finance, and seemingly nobody to hold institutions and individuals accountable. Were we expected to just forget Jeffrey Epstein, for example, and all the relationships and lack of investigation? It seems so. You either close your eyes to it, or you're forced down some dark rabbit holes just to form a cohesive worldview. The few beacons of light today are now all brave individuals - podcasters, twitter accounts, leakers, writers - and their very existence feels fragile. So this article strikes me as extremely shallow. We're not operating in business-as-usual, where just a few tweaks and the metrics will look good again.

People have lost trust in the media. Let’s trick them by having completely out of touch CEOs talk it up.

Perfection.

Pushing narratives instead of reporting the truth has a corrosive effect on reputation, who knew? ;-)

There are many small teams on YouTube and other places that are building up a community of patrons to sponsor their efforts, both in news and other areas.

It is through these efforts that I see a replacement for the mass media emerging. Their dedicated non-advertiser driven source of support allows them to take risks that are simply not possible otherwise. They can tell the truth without worry of offending corporate overlords, or other institutions.

After decades of mainstream media abusing their position instead of being an actual balancing fourth power, the chicken are coming home to roost.

For me the realization that the mainstream media was not fulfilling their role anymore was:

    - following 9/11, when *none* of the mainstream outlets had the guts to question the decisions to go into Iraq and all aligned to sing 'hail to the chief' in base fear of being called anti-american.

    - in 2005, when the danish mohamed cartoons crisis came and went and most the American main media cowardly caved in to pressure and refused to publish the cartoons [1] [2] [3]

I don't believe there is anything they can do to reverse the trend. And to be honest, I really won't be sad to see them die the horrible death they deserve.

What worries me is that we do indeed need some social apparatus than can speak truth to power, and there isn't anything yet that I can see that will provide that: the internet style wannabe replacement (blogs, YT pundits, etc...) are just too diluted for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_that_reprin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cartoons_that_Shook_the_Wo...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_OR3b-97Ds

I see most takes here discussing the growing distrust in media as a problem to fix. Instead, I see it as a welcome change, a necessary but not sufficient condition to a more free society. The media has always been extremely biased, selling a particular elite consensus view of the world. Sure, some real reporting made it though once in a while, especially when it was orthogonal to the overarching narrative or when it directly served it. But major news organizations have always been run and edited by the same academic elite and political elite who make policy.

For some examples, you will not find any high-level media people (senior editors, senior reporters) at any US institution who believe the Vietnam war was an act of aggression, who believe George Bush Jr was a war criminal, who believe consumerism and economic growth are not a net good in the world, who believe the USA is most responsible for the state of the Middle East, who believe Cuba has often been a force for good in the world and the illegal embargo against it should be lifted, who believe Israel is an apartheid state performing daily acts of aggression against Palestine, who believe that its fair and good for people who don't work to be poor and miserable, and so on.

You don't have to accept these views as true, but you should still note that CNN and The New York Times and Fox News and Breitbart all agree on the bedrock narrative of the USA's fundamentally noble role in the world, its fairness to its citizens, its desire to do good, even if they disagree on a few specifics and may or may not think there were some mistakes along the way.

To me it seems that having people distrust this media is like having people distrust Pravda in the USSR: absolutely crucial if they are to think of a better world. Now of course, some people stop trusting the NYT and move to trusting flat earth groups on FB, which is worse. But I believe that the great good that comes from realizing you shouldn't trust those in authority simply because you've been taught to will see a slow but fundamental shift in society. One that news organizations and PR firms and other propaganda machines will fight tooth and nail, as this article shows.

We have large businesses professing to be news but utterly lacking in commitment to the truth. Channels prepared to lie knowingly, while insisting everyone else is lying.

Even a world where, say, 90% of media is impeccable, but 10% is bullshit, is like a poker game where 10% of the players are shamelessly cheating while loudly telling you the game is rigged. They are correct: they broke the game.

It's really, really hard to compete against shameless cheats and liars.

At the bottom of this rundown there is a "Bottom line: CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure."

It's just one line but they've spent the whole post talking about how media is not trusted and then end it with a clearly opinionated bottom line.

How does this help?

Trust in government is even lower - hovering at around 24%.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...

Pew research breaks it down sharply from 2016 to 2021 by social media, local news, and national news: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/30/partisan-di...

Anyone know of efforts to fix this space? Looking for a good excuse to quit my well paid corporate job and make a difference. News today is:

- Infotainment - Tribal reinforcement - Irrelevant - Not actionable (and thus, depressing) - Making people think the world is getting worse - Immediate and not well thought out or nuanced

In some ways it's their fault, but on the other hand, the modern reader won't pay for news. Maybe it's largely a business model problem?

It's literally killing people and needs to be disrupted, fixed.

"The natural bodies of administration which are traditionally either elected by people at large or appointed by elected leaders of society are being actively substituted by artificial bodies. Groups of people that nobody elected. As a matter of fact most of the people do not like them at all, yet they exist.

One such group is media - who elected them? How come they have so much monopolistic power over your mind? How come they have the nerve to decide what is good or bad for the elected president and his administration? Who are they?...

... Power structure slowly is eroded by groups of people who do not have neither qualifications nor will of people to keep them in power. Yet they do have power."

-Yuri Bezmenov, describing how to slowly infiltrate the culture of a targeted society [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/Y9TviIuXPSE?t=1003

Edelman, which creates the Trust Barometer, is a public relations firm which has a particular view of the world. It would be interesting to see the full list of questions they asked people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelman_(firm)#Controversies

I would argue that it's the divisive political environment and style of reporting that Axios does (see below) that creates an "uninformed public" which creates that distrust. Note in places like Finland (where there is more consensus politics and more people read newspapers) media trust has increased https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finland_has_highest_trust....

"VandeHei said he wanted Axios to be a "mix between The Economist and Twitter"..."Axios's articles are typically brief and matter-of-fact: most are shorter than 300 words and use bullet points so they are easier to scan"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axios_(website)

Today's example of the media pushing a false story without bothering to do the least bit of fact checking first:

https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1434591443855753220

I have been trying to imagine a kind of template for news commentary that could attempt to award productive discourse. I don't think there's an easy way around it being gamed but it's fun to think about. Something like:

* Here are several basic facts

* Here is our best interpretation of the facts given the context.

* here are interpretations that the other side(s) are putting forth, stated in their strongest form such that they would agree with it as stated

* here is our analysis of why those other interpretations are not as strong as our own.

You could maybe rank or sort these based on how many 'other siders' agree with (upvote) their presentation of the other side mixed with how much you agree with the basis of their analysis to choose your favorite sources of commentary.

> Faith in society's central institutions, especially in government and the media, is the glue that holds society together.

Perhaps people are starting to think that having media as a “central institution” is not actually good for society.

Why should MASS media be trusted? They exist to make money and they are free to use. How in the world they can be anything but a manipulation (which includes but not limited to, just simply a distraction)?

If you need real news, use Bloomberg, AP, Reuters... Yeah that's $1500 per month, and even more importantly, they are too boring to read for an average person, so they wouldn't be popular even if they were free. People who make actual decisions based on news, read them, for rest, there is this "newstainment" industry and it's no problem at all if it's not trustworthy.

Here is one of those CEO's we should trust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k

...who are these people that trust CEOs? How often do you even hear something that comes across as genuine, and not some fluff non-committal bs that says nothing?

Maybe the title should read: The average media consumer becomes more news literate.

In the advent of social media being a megaphone and a news source nowadays, media organizations ceased to own the monopoly of news.

It doesn't help matters that old media is busy cannibalizing the very thing that built its brand: quality journalism.

Very common to see media organizations these days report government speech as facts. Investigative journalism is nothing but an old fable now.

Ban advertising, which is paid lying, and then the trust problems that result from everyone being paid to lie and exclusively being paid to lie will go away.

For me, I 'trust' a news source if it is reporting relevant, interesting or useful information - not a bunch of hyped up garbage. I expect every legitimate news source to be factually correct about events- that doesn't make them trustworthy, however.

This article lacks any self-reflection at all. Summary: media good, public bad, trust your ruling elite.

So you're saying we don't trust the for-profit news companies that spew out 24/7 bullshit onto the working class?

That includes Axios as well.

Misinformation aside, I suspect the media lies and spins things just as much as in the past, its largely through social media that real facts come out to show how the main media is often wrong or misleading. Of course there is way to much rumor and plain wrong stuff on SM too.

English language media is dominated by a remarkably small number of organisations.

8 months old article, should be tagged as (2020) at least, I'd like to know how they collected and analyzed data for 2021 in those first 3 weeks of 2021...

maybe I'd have trust in media, if they provided balanced view from various sides and not push their agenda, also hiring any kid which can type sentence with autocorrect, but make basic logical errors doesn't fill me with trust in such media

Simple solution - look at all the other western democracies that don't have this problem (I really mean have this problem less, obviously there is going to be biased tabloid rags in every country).

Coincidentally, this seems to align pretty well with countries that don't have a bunch of media outlets owned by the Murdoch empire... curious.

Let's be honest, the media is just giving the people what they want, people subconsciously want bias news, its not pleasent to read news that disagrees with your own views. Why do you think facebook modified their algorithms for this? This applies to both on the left and the right politically.

> As vaccine rumor hunter Heidi Larson puts it, "we don’t have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.”

That about sums it up. The lies are fine, the problem is that nobody believes them. But let's imagine that the media wanted to regain the trust of the public by being more trustworthy.

Here is some advice:

Acknowledge bias. Too many in the media try to portray themselves as truth-tellers, and everyone else has hopelessly biased propagandists. Just own it. Be clear about ideological positions and points of agreement and disagreement with other political actors.

Acknowledge uncertainty. The truth is out there, but we often don't know what it is. Be willing to delay judgement until the facts are in, update conclusions when new evidence surfaces, and treat some "facts" as tentative when they're based on weak or the balance of contradictory evidence.

Criticize allies. If somebody is lying to support a conclusion you agree with, call them out. The ends do not justify the means.

Praise opponents. When "the other side" says something you agree with, say so, without any caveats about the other stuff you still disagree with. When they tell the truth, acknowledge the honesty. If they argue in good faith, engage with the ideas in good faith.

In the end, this stuff is not that hard for people that actually care about the truth. It doesn't seem like the media does anymore. Instead, they're mostly engaged in tribalism: signaling loyalty to the tribe, disseminating dogma and asserting the moral superiority of the tribe. No wonder trust is so low.

That zoomed graph that shows the y axis only from 45% to 60%[1] is an oximoron that proves itself why has hit a new low.

[1]https://imgur.com/jaFyxxj

Gaining social media trust is the job of media platforms.

And what people can do is educating themselves about news literacy, to better get the git out of the opinionated-purposeful-news (and sometime misleading).

Very good they are thinking about addressing this, but they are still labouring under a few bits of their own misinformation.

Claiming it is a central part of someone's identity, and article of faith, and that they can't be argued out of it, is dead wrong. It is the result of misinformation being spread by the news media, refusal to retract incorrect articles, clear bias and manipulation. If that behavior stopped, over a long period of time trust would be regained.

They are correct that it isn't just the US, it is all across the Anglosphere. Just today:

1. In NZ at newshub an article claimed not that the evidence supporting use of Ivermectin in cases of COVID-19 wasn't compelling but that there "is no evidence that supports the use of [Ivermectin] in the treatment of COVID-19." I know that's a lie because I have a folder of scores of research papers on this topic.

2. Fake news about a Hospital in Oklahoma backed up by Ivermectin overdose patients. Not retracted. Amplified by Rachel Maddow.

3. Same newshub (and other outlets) posted about a backlash against David Seymour. That's true, but they took an ideological position against David Seymour. They could have taken an inverse ideological position arguing that David was fighting against institutional racism on behalf of underrepresented people in need that happen to not be Maori... or better yet remained neutral. My stomach turns every time I see this government use race as the determining factor in who gets special treatment, instead of "poverty" or "low vaccine uptake" or any other property... I don't argue this point for myself (I'm highly privileged) but for countless underprivileged of other races like Indonesian or Malaysian or Palestinean who need help but get turned away because they aren't Maori.

That's just today. This shit has been going on for years now.

At this point, most people will never again trust the media for the rest of their lives.

So this is from a very right-wing perspective, but it's a pretty compelling explainer as to why many people have no trust in media...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1422181544161128450.html

I find it strange that anyone still trusts the media.

A bizarre take on the media, that somehow transitions into a barely related conclusion about infrastructure.

Just seems poorly thought out.

The media’s handling of the Covid crisis has been dismal, no wonder, the public is turning away

Of course trust in media is low.

Look at this thread describing all the politically-motivated media spinners caught in a blatant lie.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1434591443855753220.html

I don’t think this is related to the media directly but is more related to the information during the pandemic.

Unfortunately science has said a lot of controversial things, not because it has failed but because it’s a new “thing” and must be studied and examined. So media have reported correct everything but the infos, at the beginning, were a bit misleading, like for the UNHCR with “no mask, then yes mask” or the story with AstraZeneca vaccine or the third shot etc…

Plus the “Afghanistan gate” where all media were reporting “Kabul can resists 3 months” and 7 days after it was in the Taliban’s hands.

And don’t forget all the infos on Facebook and other media, people are getting their infos on socials unfortunately, not because they’re more reliable but because they can confirm they’re theories. I mean a no-vax on FB will receive more no-vax infos due to the algorithm biases, so he will keep getting infos and trust in FB.

That’s not good by the way, we need more great journalists and newspapers!

Journalists have evolved into an enemy of the people as they promote their personal, and corporate political beliefs on the rest of us, while passing it off as “just the facts.” I think journalism lost its “inform the public” mantle many years ago as journalists saw the power they had. As another commentor said, burn it to the ground, the media and journalism in general is forever poisoned against the people.

They might start with cutting the opinion section, and go from their.

"Qui?!"

https://ground.news tries to solve this problem in an interesting way. It has a bunch of articles, where it shows how many left- and right-wing sources it was compiled from.

We need a Howard Beale… except in this day and age I’m pretty sure they would be silently cut off by the station manager from the production booth and such a speech never heard by the public but here for anyone who hasn’t heard it is the speech by the character Howard Beale (a newscaster) from the 1975 movie “Network”….

  ————————————

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. (shouting) You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

  ————————————

When was the last time you saw someone interviewed on TV who didn’t have a book to sell? At this point they could stop mentioning the books at all and I’d assume they were advertising them in the lower third or on the website and I hadn’t noticed it or perhaps that they have just started to expect viewers will search for the person online and find their book like some kind of Pavlovian response.

The only way I see people regaining trust in established media organisations is if they were “watching them burn”. The distrust is so built in now that to be trustworthy they have to be actively engaged in blatant self sabotage before we can overcome our collective cynicism. For us to trust them they must believe the “truth” they wish to tell us so much they are willing to self-immolate in-front of their audience otherwise how can we possibly tell it isn’t yet another marketing campaign for someone pulling the strings we haven’t seen yet.

There's been a 30 year propaganda campaign to slander everything that isn't far right propaganda as untrustworthy. Are we all surprised this well funded relentless assault to lionize the rich and endlessly attack journalists has had this effect?

This is exactly the goals of their strategy

I stopped following corporate news 2 years ago and started paying for independent creators and journalists instead on Substack and Locals. I follow substack, locals and other communities of of Glenn Greenwald, Viva Frei and Robert Barnes, Kim Iverson, Steven Crowder mug club, Jimmy Dore, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate, Michael Tracey, Alison Morrow, Sharyl Attkinson.