Media Surprised to Find No-One Trusts Them

The mainstream media are shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that people think they’re lying ideologues. As the furore over Joe Rogan shows, they’re worried. But the relentless attacks on Rogan also show that, rather than cop to their own egregious failures, the mainstream media are in a frenzy of blame-shifting.

Anything, rather than admit that they’ve cut off their own noses to spite their ideological faces.

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer survey reveals only 43 per cent of Australians trust the media “to do what is right” compared with 51 per cent in last year’s report. Trust in government (minus nine points) and non-government organisations (minus seven points) also has fallen.

Perhaps the most sobering finding is that 67 per cent of respondents in the global survey believe journalists “are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations”.

Gee, I wonder why anyone would think that? I mean, it’s not as if the media knowingly lied about “Russian collusion”, or Hunter Biden’s laptop. It’s not as if Australia’s self-anointed “most trusted news source” has repeatedly lied and served Australians a steady diet of bias. It’s certainly not as if the New Zealand media, with $55m of government money in their pockets, have lied and propagandised.

Still, while we’ve long known that the media are unabashed liars (it’s been nearly 20 years since Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy joked about a mythical time “when people believed everything they heard on TV”), 2016 ripped off the band-aid for well and good.

Western anti-establishment fervour took the liberal political-media class by surprise when Donald Trump was elected as US president and the British people’s vote went to Brexit. As Islamic State spread into the West, killing men, women and children, citizens of the free world decided the decades-long experiment with porous borders had come to an end. Political parties that preached globalism and ignored the patriotic zeitgeist lost elections to politicians determined to protect Western civilisation against international jihad.

Anger at the media grew as a result of the press demeaning pro-Western voters and falsely equating them with racists or uneducated morons. Liberal media ran such hate-filled campaigns against people who supported Trump and Brexit that it became seen, rightly, as a partisan force campaigning against the democratic will of the people. Instead of speaking truth to power, members of the media were more invested in preserving their own power than revealing unfashionable truths.

It’s rather telling that even a journalist supposedly castigating her colleagues for ideological blindness has her own blind spot.

More recently, mainstream media has been accused of elitism for supporting vaccination during the Covid pandemic. It strikes me as contradictory to ascribe to journalists seeking to protect the health of fellow citizens some sort of anti-democratic motive.

Because that’s exactly what it is. That journalists don’t give a rat’s arse about “the health of their fellow citizens” is exemplified by their ongoing failure to critically examine the pandemic narrative, especially the deadly policies of lockdowns, the essential uselessness of mask mandates, or to report anything like an even-handed analysis of the dangers as well as the (we now know small) benefits of the covid vaccines.

Instead, journalists have sneered at anyone doubting the covid vaccines as an “anti-vaxxer”, smeared them as “white supremacists”, and led a honking chorus demanding ever-harsher coercion against vaccine doubters.

Compounding the complete lack of awareness of even halfway-honest mainstream journalists is tilting at the windmill of Big Tech.

Traditional media is under pressure as social media giants compete for content without the need to maintain big news organisations with national and international teams of editors, reporters, investigative journalists, specialist writers and columnists.

Are they out of touch, the mainstream media wonder? No, they reassure themselves: it’s social media who are to blame.

The MSM’s screeching about “social media giants” is an hilariously maladroit swing-and-miss. While the MSM has obsessed over Google and Facebook scraping their content, they’ve been completely blind to the independent media quietly sneaking up behind them. I’ve often compared the indie revolution in media to the indie revolution in music in the 80s. Joe Rogan being snapped up by Spotify is the equivalent to REM ditching indie label IRS in 1988 and signing to Warner Bros and global superstardom.

People are noticing who’s on their side. While the mainstream media whine about being heckled in public, indie media like Avi Yemini and Real Rukshan are treated like rockstars. The BFD’s audience is creeping up on the mainstream media sites, all without a cent of government money.

While the media has much to answer for, readers and viewers have yet to realise how much power they wield to shape the news with a click of the mouse or a well-crafted comment. The power is yours. Take it.

The Australian

Oh, we are. Believe you me, we are.