'And That's the Way It Is'
More people than ever utterly distrust the media, and even Democrat trust has fallen off a cliff in the Biden years.
I included a 2022 version of this Gallup chart in the essay I wrote yesterday. Today, at the behest of my stepdaughter, I spent some time looking at the Media Bias Chart from Ad Fontes, an organization whose self-described mission is “to rate all the news to positively transform society.” I encourage you to come to your own conclusions about why trust in the media is so low, but you could do worse than reading the devastating analysis of a career NPR editor. I was a reporter and editor in another life — in a galaxy far, far away — and so I include my own underwhelming observations below.
Ad Fontes rates the vast majority of mainstream sources — NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, UPI, etc. — as reliable and biased by only a few points to the left. You can’t tell from the screenshot below, but National Public Radio’s “News Now” podcast is rated with the highest trust and the least bias (the Wall Street Journal is a close second).
So how can it be that most of the mainstream media outlets are trustworthy but almost 40% of Gallup respondents have absolutely no trust in the media, and 68% have none or not very much? And why does Ad Fontes put 24 news sources on the extreme untrustworthy right, and only 8 sources on the extreme end of the untrustworthy left?
The next chart from Gallup explains.
Most mainstream outlets are “trustworthy” because most Democrats say they are, and the right-wing sources are “untrustworthy” because they’re not mainstream.
But something important is happening, so let’s take a closer look.
In 2016 — the year Trump was elected — only 51% of Democrats found the news trustworthy. By 2017, that number had shot up 21 points (!) and Democrat trust in the media peaked at 76% in 2018 — the highest number recorded on the Gallup chart.
And what was happening in 2016-2018?
From 2020 (when Joe Biden was elected) to 2023, the number of Democrats who trust the news dropped by 15 points, from 73% to 58%. Republican trust stayed much the same, which is to say at the lowest levels in Gallup’s history.
(Update: so have you noticed that everything Democrats want is assumed by Democrats to be true? They wanted all of the fake Russian collusion news in 2016-2018 to be true, so their trust in media jumped 25 points in two years.)
The 8-year Democrat swing is stunning. But I’ll let those facts stand where they are and circle back to the NPR podcast that rates the highest trust and the least bias from Ad Fontes. That, too, is a curious fact given Uri Berliner’s recent piece in the Free Press: “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”
Uri Berliner describes himself this way: “I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.” And this, he says, is the problem with NPR:
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
From 1990 to 2022, I worked in the communications and IT departments of the California State Employees Association. Now a shell of its former self, from the 1930s to roughly the year 2010, CSEA was the largest and most powerful public employee union in the state of California.
And in 2002, I was reading Bias, Bernard Goldberg’s book on how the media distorts the news. Many of my left-wing colleagues were former journalists, too, and I accidentally started a firestorm one day when I took the book to work.
In abbreviated form, the argument went something like this.
Me: I think Goldberg is right, the media is biased.
All my colleagues: There’s no media bias! You’re just a white man who’s afraid of losing your power!
When I was done with the book, I left it in the break room and never saw it again.
Not much has changed since then. Today, and against all available evidence, all the Democrats I know still insist there’s no appreciable media bias. Or, if there is, the bias is justified because we can’t let Nazis win elections.
And if you’re having a conversation with a Democrat, and you mention that a left-wing Sarah Lawrence–educated NPR editor who was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother thinks NPR is biased, well, that’s when the conversation ends.
I don’t know what to do about that, but I do think the times they are a-changin’. And, as Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is.”
I’m reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which , based on what the WEF and many governments and media outlets and social media platforms are saying about the need to censor speech today, had to have been written yesterday.