Media Falls Below Congress in Trust Survey

by Matt Taibbi | Oct 17, 2024

The just-released results from Gallup’s Trust in Media Survey leave no doubt that members of my profession are officially America’s lowest life form. Gallup asked:

In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, T.V. and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?

A great deal 7
Fair amount 25
Not very much 29
None at all 39

The Great Deal/Fair Amount number of 32% merely ties Gallup’s lowest-ever number, first recorded in 2016. The more shocking result is the combined Not much (29%) and None at all (39!) number of 68%. That is one point lower than the 67% figure posted by the usual standard-setter for mistrust: “The legislative branch, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.” It’s really not that close, as most distrust of Congress is of the softer, “Not very much” variety (44%), while the press laps elected counterparts by 15 points (39%-24%) in the far more hardcore None at all category.

It’s impossible to overstate this embarrassment. There are necrophiliacs who wouldn’t touch a congressional corpse. You may not hesitate to sacrifice a congressman in a lifeboat, but you think twice about eating him, even starving. Record fines for misconduct, and more informational access to behaviors like legal insider trading mean the elected officials Twain called America’s only “distinctly native criminal class” are hated more than ever. Yet expectations for journalists are now lower than those for Congress. Asked about trust in a politician, “None at all” is what people say when they expect nothing to get done. With media, it’s what you say if you don’t even trust a reporter to tell the time. It’s an extraordinary indictment.

The new horrorshow figures are driven by a 12% drop among Democrats. That’s important because press watchdogs for years blew off low survey results, saying they were artificially weighted because “being ‘anti-media’ is part of [Republicans’] political identity,” as FiveThirtyEight once put it. That was back when most corporate media companies were proudly in the doling-shit-out business. Now they’re eating it, full-time:

Why did the writers at FiveThirtyEight and so many other places believe “being anti-media” was part of Republican political identity? Because they’d been “told for decades the media is against them,” as Perry Bacon, Jr. put it. Therefore, media writers reasoned, the trust gap was no problem, because Republicans are drooling dupes and truth-deniers who resent reportorial rectitude and fealty to fact.

“It’s Fox’s fault” became the go-to response to each survey showing trust loss. Then it was Trump’s fault. “Donald Trump has convinced Republicans to disbelieve mainstream journalism,” wrote The Economist in an article titled, “For Americans, trusting the media has become a partisan issue.” Oliver Darcy at CNN reacted to one of the polls by complaining, “Some of the most popular media and political figures… actively pollute the information landscape,” noting it’s hard to reach people living “in an entirely different media ecosystem largely void of fact-based journalism.” How do you expect us to reach brainwashed people?

Darcy’s then-colleague Brian Stelter explained bad numbers as “largely” due to Republican sentiment, but also noted face control at the club entrance was too lax. “Everyone is a member of the media now,” he sighed, in a tirade over the chyron, HERE’S WHAT EVERYONE GETS WRONG ABOUT TRUST IN MEDIA. In journalism, he said, there are “repeaters and reporters.” Repeaters, like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro, just “cherry-pick stories” with “hyper-partisan” angles and “amplify propaganda” while telling people to “hate the other side.” Reporters, like the people at CNN (who one can tell are more reporter-y because they have more foreign bureaus), tell you “what is true,” not what you want to be true. If that divide can be bridged, Stelter posited, it would be through asking hard questions, like “Why is it the right-wing media outlets do so little reporting?” Why are they so averse to “reality-based” media, so willing to repeat “Donald Trump’s lies”?

This “repeaters and reporters” speech decrying “propaganda” was given in October of 2021, the peak of Covid-19 mania, when the practice of outlets like CNN taking phrases written by the White House or the CDC and rushing them straight on the air became undisguised. The “pandemic of the unvaccinated” went straight from Joe Biden’s or Rochelle Walensky’s mouths into headlines that journalists and commentators at places like CNN and the New York Times presented as their own words. “And back to our lead story: a pandemic of the unvaccinated?” Brian Williams intoned, imitating the stentorian delivery of Walter Cronkite, a real trusted anchor.

These stories led to brutal condemnations of people who didn’t take the shot, a low point being a sadistic Jimmy Kimmel segment just a month before Stelter’s, in which he announced he’d proudly deny ER care to the “pandimwits” who refused the vaccine: “Rest in peace, wheezy!”:

Within a year it was clear the CDC, Biden, Anthony Fauci and the medical establishment were dead wrong about the vaccine’s efficacy, and “pandimwits” were not, in fact, responsible for the disease spreading. This was a devastating blow to the credibility of health authorities and still more costly to journalists, who had ample opportunity to listen to the very credentialed experts they claim must be solely relied on in these situations.

It was vaccine proponents like German physician Günter Kampf who pleaded with authorities and media in journals like The Lancet — not Fox or OAN — to “stop the inappropriate stigmatization of unvaccinated people.” It’s simply false that people predisposed not to believe you, never will. Especially in a crisis, audiences tend to come back, and they will offer trust back, so long as you treat it with respect, which is exactly what didn’t happen. Audiences don’t quickly get over being blamed for killing millions of people, and the road back doesn’t involve asking why “right-wing media outlets” suck so much.

Trust in media was at an all-time high in the early seventies, cresting with Watergate and the fairy-tale saga of muckrakers toppling a president. When the press whiffs on stories, though, failures show up in graphs like this as if lit by neon. The WMD disaster caused a plunge across the board. Still, trust in media among Democrats soared after Trump’s election, when the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” era media formally allied itself with the anti-Trump cause. As the Russiagate story developed, even Republicans began believing, but when it collapsed, the bottom fell out for Republicans and Independents.

Democrat belief in “reporters vs. repeaters” somehow held through a long list of flops, from Nord Stream to the myriad Covid failures to unreliable news from Ukraine and Israel. The survey that shoved the press under Congress was taken between September 1-23, right after the “Biden is Sharp as a Tack” meme finally exploded, leaving Democrats staring at a white-knuckle election with media at least partly to blame. The press, perhaps sensing the mask is off, has responded with caution-to-the-wind capers like the loony 60 Minutes edit of Kamala Harris and a new New York Times attempt at whitewashing a Harris plagiarism story in which one of the paper’s expert sources is claiming he was set up.

The implied justification for all this craven behavior is that it helps stave off a Donald Trump win. If that happens anyway, and blue audiences come away as disgusted as Republicans, it’ll be Goodnight, Irene for trust in conventional media companies, who’ll remember this week’s hideous survey as the good old days.