Survey Reveals Growing Distrust In News Media

Nearly half of Americans say they avoid reading the news, a problem for both citizens and the journalism profession. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Nearly half of Americans say that they avoid reading the news, it's a problem both for citizens and the, and journalists. This is, these are startling kinds of numbers that I read. This was in the Guardian. And, well first of all, give me your take on that story where they say 42% of the, of the public now avoids the news totally. And I wanna go through the list of reasons.

Yeah. I, I, I think it's obviously a very bad thing for this country. We're already so misinformed and uninformed as it is. So for almost half the country to say, you know what? I'm just done with the news. It is really bad for our, our public education. But then again, if you are a regular news consumer, you're still probably not getting real actual factual news. So I don't know if it's bad that people aren't watching the news or if it's good that people aren't watching the news. I just know we've got some big problems and I, I don't even know where to begin.

Here, here's the list of things that the writers say that the reason that there, the news is in the hole right now. Loss of confidence in the news. Hate agendas, they say there's too much hate agenda by the news. The, that it's untrustworthy. These are words that come out of these polls. That the bias is such that they can't believe what they're being told. That it's inaccurate, most of the time it's gonna be inaccurate when they do their own look and they find out well, was this true? It's self-serving. Now you and I have talked about this. Self-serving in the fact that they're gonna let an advertiser get away with a hell of a lot. For example, the pharmaceutical industry advertising on all the media, every, every four seconds, you have an ad. Well, it's very difficult to break through and have the news actually report that, that pharmaceutical, that they're advertising is killing people. Or how about the weapons industry that you like to talk about?

Yeah, they, they're sitting there Boeing, you know, advertising. Oh, look at our, our wonderful jet engines. GE is another one. Look at, we're making these wonderful jet engines here on this commercial. What are you even selling? I mean, we're not.

Are you gonna buy a jet engine?

I, I have no plans for it in the future.

But what are they really doing?

They're buying their influence. They're making sure that, hey, you can't go after us because we just spent 40 million this quarter.

Yeah.

Making sure that we running ads on your network.

Yeah.

So you gotta be nice to us.

That's one of the things that people are recognizing right now.

And it's about time.

That's self-serving advertising agendas. The fact, this is startling to me, that they felt like the, the media is trying to engage in social engineering that offended, that's offensive to them. Their point being, just give me the news. Another point was that it's being driven, that all the media is being driven by the top 1% elite. But I, I don't think you can put it all on the media, do you?

No, I, I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, people just in general seeking out information that just reaffirms what they already believe.

Mm-hmm.

You know, the stuff they want to hear. And, and we, we do see that all the time, you know, we see it on the left, we see it on the right. People only want to know what they think they already know or something, of course, as you pointed out that the hate agenda that's gonna make 'em angry, or that's gonna show that, hey, this person you dislike did another bad thing. I mean that, that's what most of all online media is today.

Yeah. Well, they're, microfocused on their agenda. It's almost childlike. You and I joke all the time, we can put up a story that this, the headlines can be cancer, I mean, is cured. Cancer is, is cured, cured last Wednesday.

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