Trust by the Numbers

Blog Hop Topic – Do a survey of your readers and publish the results.

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I didn’t participate in the blog hop last week because I really couldn’t think of a poll I wanted to do, but then I hit upon a question that I thought would work.

=How Much Do You Trust Mass Media to Report the News Fully, Honestly and Fairly?

I got different results depending on the forum I asked the question on.

The blog got likes on the question, but no responses — which was one reason I didn’t participate last week. That happens more often than not on blog polls – mine, anyway.

Facebook fans – many of whom are writers – don’t trust the mass media at all. Well, a few said they trusted some sources more than others and they disagreed about which sources are more trustworthy. There were the perennial arguments over whether Fox News can even be called news compared to, say, network news and if it would be better under the “Fairness” Doctrine. Such is the nature of a “poll” taken on a forum that encourages comments. I have liberal and conservative followers and even a few libertarians weighed in. I’d say fewer than 10% trust the media to any degree at all.

On Twitter, 8% mostly trust the mass media to give them full, fair and honest reporting, while 31% partially trust the mass media. That leaves 61% of the respondents who rarely trust the media to give them the straight scoop on anything.

What do I think about those results?

Twitter respondents are apparently optimists because 39% of them believe you can trust the media to some degree. One woman did comment that she trusts the sources she’s researched and approves of how they were funded. Okay, that makes sense — sort of. But who is to say that – for example, government-funded media is more trustworthy than privately funded media? I watch PBS and see a lot of propaganda being pushed there, then I flip over to CBS and that’s all propaganda. Fox and CNN … news with a decidedly ideological bent sometimes with propaganda mixed in. Some websites are also propaganda, while others report the news from an ideological bent.

I’m not surprised that only about 10% believe the media can be trusted most of the time and only about 40% believe it can be trusted at all, but I suspect we need to be honest with ourselves and say we really can’t trust any one source to report fully, honestly and fairly. You could maybe follow 2 or 3 and get a well-rounded idea of what’s really going on, but they all are slanted so you can’t just trust a single one.

I also asked a few coworkers about this question and got some interesting answers. A couple of them blame Donald Trump and his “fake news” diatribes for making people distrust the media … or they blame Sarah Palin for her “lame stream” media comments. But really, I think — unless you’ve been hiding in a bunker without an Internet connection for, well, decades … you’d have to be pretty naive to trust the mass media, because they’ve done such a poor job of being honest, fair and full in their reporting.  Remember when we were kids and our parents trusted Walter Cronkite to give them the truth? Well, it turned out he was lying and slanting the news for his own purposes. He wasn’t doing anything new, by the way. Edward R. Morrow lied about the World War 2. The New York Times lied us into World War 1 when it insisted the Lusitania wasn’t carrying arms. The Hearst Media empire created fake news to convince Americans that the Maine explosion was an act of war rather than an attempt at self-protection. Heck, newspapers in the Civil War days carried water for the Confederates and the Union. The media claims its goal is to provide full, fair and honest reporting of actual facts, but reporters are human beings who are influenced by their prejudices and who work for editors and producers who sometimes have agendas on one side or the other of an event. How could any human-made institution be wholly fair, honest and full given the biases that are so much a part of us as human beings?

And, there you have it.