TRUMP IS MORE TRUSTED THAN POLITICAL MEDIA
Well, to be fair, almost anyone is more trusted than the national political media. Morning Consult reports on a poll of more than 2,000 Americans:
Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they trusted Trump’s White House to tell the truth, while 29 percent opted for the media.
Responses to this question are of course highly partisan, but independents, like Republicans, trust the Trump administration more than the political media:
But the media also scored low marks among independents, with more than half saying they didn’t trust national news outlets to cover the White House fairly and that they trusted Trump more. Roughly half (49 percent) also said the media was out of touch and 43 percent said outlets had been harder on Trump than other presidents.
Liberals coined the term “fake news” to try to discredit conservatives, but Trump and others have successfully turned the phrase around:
Trump’s critiques of the media, which he commonly derides as “fake news” also seems to have struck a chord with Americans. A plurality (42 percent) said they see fake news in national newspapers or network news broadcasts more than once or about once a day. About 3 in 10 (31 percent) said they saw fake news from those sources once every few days, once a week or slightly less often than that.
Political reporters launch daily broadsides against President Trump, and are frustrated that they don’t seem to have much impact. I suspect that they still don’t understand how deeply (and justly) unpopular they are with the American people.
Remember when reporters called Ronald Reagan the “Teflon president”? Then, too, they were frustrated that the mud they constantly flung at the president didn’t seem to stick. What was going on, in reality, was that voters weren’t particularly impressed by the press’s daily savaging of President Reagan. Reporters attributed this to some mysterious “Teflon” quality on the part of the president. In fact, the dynamic was much the same as what we see today with the press and President Trump.
Which doesn’t mean that it is helpful to be viciously attacked every day. It obviously isn’t. But when the press is so little trusted, diminishing returns set in pretty quickly.
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