As everyone reading this knows, the mainstream media spent the past four years beating up on an elected President, doing their level best to ensure he was not reelected. Now Axios reports the unintended consequence of those actions.
By the numbers: For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media, according to data from Edelman's annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios. Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.
- 56% of Americans agree with the statement that "Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."
- 58% think that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public."
- When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.
The mind-boggling part of these findings is that scarcely more than half of Democrats trust the media, when it has told them what they supposedly wanted to hear for four years.
—————
What you see is the result of journalism learning the wrong lesson from Watergate. Particularly from the David-versus-Goliath role of ‘hero’ journalists Woodward and Bernstein in it.
The correct lesson from Watergate was journalists finding evidence of elected officials violating laws and holding them responsible. The wrong lesson was that since Nixon and his cronies were Republicans, henceforth all of journalism’s investigatory targets would be Republicans.
Actual wrongdoing has no party or ideological label, there are targets aplenty on both sides. Journalism was once a noble profession, propagandist has never been noble.
