The establishment media continues to become more and more unpopular — for a very good reason.
A major survey came out this week showing deep distrust in the media, and then a top producer at MSNBC and a recently deposed opinion editor from the New York Times aired their own biting critiques. The message from all three is that the media has forfeited professional standards and ethics. The message is correct.
“We are a cancer and there is no cure.” That’s what “a successful and insightful TV veteran” told Ariana N. Pekary, who two days ago quit her job as a producer for MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. Pekary penned a blog post agreeing with that assessment.
According to Pekary, the “model” used by cable news networks (and presumably other news outlets) “blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentives to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others.” She wrote that the cancer “risks human lives … [and] risks our democracy,” in part because “context and factual data are often considered too cumbersome for the audience.”
The main thrust of those sentiments reaffirmed the message of Bari Weiss, the New York Times opinion staff editor who resigned her position on July 14 with a scathing exit letter of her own. On Friday, during Real Time with Bill Maher, she amplified her point.
“I don't want to live in a world where the views of half of the country can't be heard in the paper of record,” Weiss said. “And that, I fear, is where we're heading."
In her resignation letter, Weiss had written: “The lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press … that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
A huge portion of the American public agrees with Weiss and Pekary. On Tuesday, the Knight Foundation and the Gallup polling organization released the results from a massive study of public attitudes toward the media. The results all look bad for the media, and almost all of them are worse than in the organizations’ previous study two years earlier.
An astonishing 86% of people see at least a significant amount of bias in the media, with 49% of those polled seeing “a great deal” of bias. Worse, the public think inaccuracies aren’t honest mistakes, but intentional, with 54% believing the media knowingly misrepresent facts and 28% saying that reporters make up facts entirely(!). The public sees bad consequences flowing directly from these misbehaviors, with 36% saying the media bears “a moderate amount” of the blame for the nation’s political divisions, plus a whopping additional 48% saying that reporters merit “a great deal” of blame.
Significantly, the public holds fast to the ideal of separating “straight news” from opinion and finds the media woefully lacking. Thus, 73% of those polled say they see “too much bias in the reporting of news stories that are supposed to be objective.”
These days, if you ask a reporter for a major network or East Coast paper about balance and fairness, you are likely to hear elitist notions about how those things are less important than divining, and instructing the masses about, “the truth.” Ask ordinary people, though, and you’ll find they would much prefer so-called news pages and newscasts to contain facts and balance, unanalyzed and without ideological filters, so readers or viewers can make up their own minds.
It's not that news consumers want no opinion; it’s that they want opinions relegated to pages or shows labeled as such. For most people, it is anathema to see a cable news anchor who shakes her head disgustedly or, worse, interrupts while an interviewee talks, or who goes off-script to comment on breaking news from the field.
Meanwhile, while the public wants a fair airing of all opinions, it is far less enamored of the establishment media’s fetish for demographic “diversity.” Yes, 35% of those polled think diversity is “critical,” and another 34% say it’s “very important,” but those numbers pale in comparison to the 65% who think “accurate and fair news reports” are “critical” and the additional 27% who say it’s “very important.”
Message to the media: Get out of your insular bubbles, get off your high horses, stop preaching “your truth” to us, and just report the damn news. Or if you want to air your opinion, then clearly label it as such. Truth in labeling matters, even if too many in the establishment media lack the integrity to practice it.
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