We Won’t Be Fooled Again

They’re not gonna know what hit them. The NZ media, already squealing like stuck pigs that just one-third of Kiwis trust them, might want to look a few years down the track at what’s happening to US media.

Spoiler alert: it’s all downhill from here.

Mainstream media approval among Americans across party lines has sunk to a record low, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.

The poll of 1,000 US adults, taken Sept 2–16, found that just 28 per cent expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, TV, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.

This is down from 31 per cent last year and 40 per cent five years ago – the first time trust has dropped below 30 per cent in the poll’s history. The poll had a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Golly, I wonder what could have happened in the last five years to bring trust in the media so low?

Meanwhile, 70 per cent of respondents said they either have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%) in the media.

Republicans’ confidence, which hasn’t risen above 21 per cent since 2015, fell into single digits (8%) for the first time. Independents’ trust was at 27 per cent, equaling last year’s record low.

Among Democrats, 51 per cent expressed trust in the media, tying a record low set in 2016.

Funny about that. It couldn’t possibly be because the media are telling them exactly what they want to hear?

And, right on cue, here’s the legacy media inadvertently explaining exactly why almost nobody trusts them.

While this is part of a decades-long downward trend that has seen US trust in mass media steadily erode, the drop has become more precipitous in recent years. In fact, after just 32 per cent of adults said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in the press in 2016, trust in the media spiked up to 45 per cent by 2018.

Since then, however, President Donald Trump and his allies in the right-wing media universe have engaged in an aggressive and concerted campaign to discredit the mainstream and legacy press, culminating in his return to the White House and an all-out assault on press freedoms and independence.

It couldn’t possibly be because the media engaged in an aggressive and concerted campaign of outright lying about the US president. “Very fine people”, “mostly peaceful”, “Russian collusion”, “Joe Biden is sharp as a tack”: it was all lies and the legacy media knew it, but they thought the hoi polloi were just too stupid to notice.

In recent months, the president has pushed for the dismantling of state-funded media and the defunding of public broadcasting, resulting in the shuttering of PBS and NPR stations and the impending extinction of Voice of America.

And? If, as Robert Heinlein said, “a government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!”, a government-supported media is even worse. Yes, we’re looking at you, PJIF recipients. Australia’s government-funded media, the ABC, has never apologised for, let alone retracted it’s four-part “Russiagate” story that we now know beyond doubt was a farrago of lies.

And don’t even get us started on Covid.

So, screw you, legacy media: you lied and you lied and you lied. Now you’re paying the price.

And you still can’t stop lying.

You deserve to die in the ditch of your own ignominy.