'Mainstream' Media Credibility Crisis: Gallup Finds 60 Percent Have Little or No Trust in 'MSM'

[Casino67]

NewsBusters:

As the media report on the allegedly horrid polls for Mitt Romney, will they take the time to report the latest on their own poll ratings with Gallup? “Americans' distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.”

 

Can the media call themselves “mainstream” when Republicans and independents tell pollsters they don’t trust them right in the midst of a fall campaign? And shouldn’t the Commission on Presidential Debates stop relying on a monopoly of “mainstream” media personalities to moderate fall debates? Here’s the ugly breakdown on trust:

Only 26 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of independents have a “great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media. Naturally, considering the tilt of their reporting, 58 percent of Democrats have a “great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media. This might explain why these "objective" media prefer to oversample Democrats in their polls.

 

"Distrust is especially up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004," Gallup said. This ought to be perceived as punishment for the media’s ridiculous over-selling of Barack Obama’s promise in 2008. As Gallup added:

The record distrust in the media, based on a survey conducted Sept. 6-9, 2012, also means that negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year. This reflects the continuation of a pattern in which negativity increases every election year compared with the year prior. The current gap between negative and positive views -- 20 percentage points -- is by far the highest Gallup has recorded since it began regularly asking the question in the 1990s. Trust in the media was much higher, and more positive than negative, in the years prior to 2004 -- as high as 72% when Gallup asked this question three times in the 1970s.