Madness and media
The sad destructive cycle warping our politics
For most of us, the sky is still blue.
This, according to a recent poll on media trust conducted by The Economist / YouGov:
The Weather Channel remains the most trusted news source among Americans overall. Americans are 53 points more likely to call The Weather Channel trustworthy as they are to call it untrustworthy.
Beyond that, there's not much to go by in terms of widely trusted information.
The New York Times had a net trust score of +54 for Democrats, but -37 for Republicans.
Fox News scored +41 for Republicans, but -16 for Democrats.
Fourteen media outlets scored at least +50 for Democrats.
Zero media outlets scored that high for Republicans.
The methodology of this particular poll was roasted by media columnist Jack Shafer, who said there’s no way the average person is familiar with the amount of media outlets (56) polled. Shafer figures that most people responded on vibes, not refined judgment.
Still, the big picture trends show up in many other polls. And on this, Shafer agrees: Media trust is going downhill, and it has become polarized.
Fox News had a lower trust rating for Republicans than you might expect.
Maybe some Republicans don’t trust Fox News because it lied to its audience about 2020 election fraud. Fox’s dishonesty eventually led to a $787.5 million defamation lawsuit settlement payment to Dominion Voting Systems.
Other Republicans don’t like Fox News because it didn’t go far enough in prosecuting Trump’s case against American election results.
Fox News was the first media outlet to project that Joe Biden won Arizona. The election call burst the bubble of Team Trump’s planned strategy to declare victory on election night regardless of the real outcome.
The Daily Wire, a right-wing media outlet that was not included on the YouGov poll, put out this report the day following the 2020 election: “Outrage Erupts Online Over Fox News’ Decision To Call Arizona For Biden. AZ Governor Responds.”
Fox opinion hosts started to worry that the network would lose favorability because of the election call, sending its audience to right-wing channels that would never do such a thing as call Biden the president-elect. This is what led to the defamation lawsuit: the Fox opinion hosts, determined to win back market share, kept promoting falsehoods about the 2020 election.
If Fox News balks at catering to madness, The Daily Wire will fill the void. If not The Daily Wire, then OAN or Newsmax or Blaze Media.
The audience is hungry. The audience gets fed.
This is why the party "establishment" didn’t turn the page on Trump after January 6th. It’s why half of Republicans still think Biden’s election was illegitimate. It’s why the right is increasingly using revolutionary rhetoric to interpret their situation.
Normal Republican politicians — the ones who haven’t capitulated to the frenzy — are in a bind. If you defend the constitutional order from bad-faith actors, you risk a future in Republican politics. But the persistence of madness threatens the future of normal Republicans anyway. It’s not going to organically correct itself over time. So in terms of party viability, you're damned if you push back, damned if you don't.
Confronted with this problem, conservatives might blame the mainstream media for parroting liberal talking points every day. No wonder Republicans turned to alternative platforms.
“Folks, just look at this sentence from the NYT,” wrote rational conservative commentator Guy Benson on Twitter last week, pointing out a glaring benefit-of-the-doubt line given to Biden that would never be given to a Republican.
Jack Shafer explains the phenomenon of media mistrust in part by saying that publications like the New York Times made a shift from being describers of news to being shapers and interpreters of news.
I think it's true that, especially with culture war stories, mainstream outlets tend to cater to progressive worldviews. Language is crafted to protect reporting from left-wing attacks on social media. That’s the vibe I get.
Fear of being out-of-step with the current “correct” stance on social justice issues has pushed the Democratic Party further left of where most voters reside.
This is why you see center-left Substackers writing exasperated columns titled, “Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity.”
I’m not saying that OAN is more credible than CNN on cultural war topics — just that the fringes provoke and feed off each other, and it’s hard to produce objective, fact-based stories in an era of chaotic, high-stakes brinksmanship.
We might be seeing a corrective tilt on this front as rational independent news outlets and Substacks are growing into the ecosystem, and as Twitter (now X) withers in influence.
Meanwhile, right-wing populist leaders have succeeded in completely delegitimizing, in the eyes of their followers, critical reports about their actions.
The sky is still blue, but we don’t live in the same universe.
The madness wasn’t caused by just one factor.
It was a perfect storm: dissatisfaction with the media establishment, general frustration with the governing establishment, and a digital revolution breaking down individual and institutional sensibility.
Into this landscape walked a Frankenstein monster seemingly designed to break the social contract. Trump was a celebrity performer who spoke the language of internet trolls. He triggered the libs and baffled conservative stalwarts. We couldn’t look away.
Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who now writes for The Bulwark, wrote a book called Why We Did It about how political operatives and right-wing media helped create the conditions that led to the Trump Era.
In one section of the book, Miller describes how Breitbart News, in an effort to gain web traffic, started a practice of “Centering the Comment Section.”
Most respectable media outlets would ignore wildly angry comments on news articles, continuing along with established editorial practices.
Breitbart paid attention to the comments and shaped news coverage to reflect the wild points of view.
Sarah Palin took social media populism for a test drive in 2008. Breitbart centered the comment section in 2012. Trump drove a bulldozer through the guardrails in 2016, and then put the constitutional order through a stress test in 2020.
In 2024, all bets are off.
The comment section is the new political establishment.
good analysis---the right has succeeded in making the mainstream media appear to be liberal because the media simply(??) reported the outrageous thing Trump et.al, did, thereby appearing "liberal."
PS: Still think Jan. 6th was a "riot" rather than an insurrection?