Thanks to Donald Trump, newspaper subscriptions are experiencing a resurgence, cable news channels like MSNBC are on a ratings high, and Americans can’t get enough of political punditry from mainstream media sources. But while the country may be more engaged than ever, they aren’t necessarily buying everything they read. In fact, a new poll suggests that most Americans have a deep distrust of mainstream news outlets.
According to a new Harvard-Harris poll published by The Hill, 65% of Americans believe that mainstream news organizations print stories that are simply untrue. As with everything, the poll’s findings are split on a partisan divide: 53% of Democrats think the mainstream media publishes fake news while 80% of Republicans feel the same way. Of course, either way, it’s not great for the high-minded journalistic reputations claimed by so many in the elite media. To have more than half of DEMOCRATS believe you’re publishing nonsense…that’s bad.
“Much of the media is now just another part of the partisan divide in the country with Republicans not trusting the ‘mainstream’ media and Democrats seeing them as reflecting their beliefs,” said Harvard-Harris pollster Mark Penn. “Every major institution from the presidency to the courts is now seen as operating in a partisan fashion in one direction or the other.”
You know the really hilarious thing about this? It was the Democrats and the mainstream media who started the whole “fake news” thing during the election. They started making the absurd claim that (obviously fictional) stories making the rounds on Facebook had tilted the election towards Donald Trump. But they didn’t realize that the “fake news” meme was just the opening Trump and conservative America was waiting for. Because the 2016 election made it more clear than ever how infected the mainstream media was with abject liberal bias.
Now the chickens have come home to roost.
And yet, no one at The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or any of the other mainstream, coastal news outlets seems to have learned their lesson. They’re still pushing this fake Russia/Trump collusion scenario. They’re still printing op-eds that paint Trump as the second coming of Hitler. They’re still spreading lies about healthcare, rural opinion polls, illegal immigration, and anything else that allows them to trash the president. They’re still blindly confident that their readers – thirsty for dirt on Trump – will stick by them no matter how erroneous and deceitful their reporting becomes.
Their collective rude awakening may be coming sooner than later.
