Only 6% Trust Media, But It Should Be Less

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Investors Business Daily:

First Amendment: More information travels faster to more consumers than ever before. So why does a new survey show trust in media at rock bottom? Because so much more accurate information is available elsewhere.

 

When Matt Drudge in early 1998 broke the story of President Bill Clinton’s indiscretions in the Oval Office study with Monica Lewinsky, it was the dawn of a new era in news reporting. Woodward and Bernstein seemed like the hip, new faces of journalism when they came along in the early 1970s and helped bring down a president. But although no one ever made a movie about Drudge, with a big star playing him, his Drudge Report heralded a bigger change in the public’s reception of information.

 

Not only did Clinton’s impeachment not lead to the president’s conviction, he may actually be returning to the White House next year. The two reporters for the fixture of the establishment of the nation’s Capital, the Washington Post, may have had long hair, but Drudge in his retro fedora was the real revolutionary. And, unlike in Woodward and Bernstein’s case, the establishment did not cheer him on.

 

There is no incongruity in the fact that a new poll conducted by the Media Insight Project, a joint project of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, finds the American media’s popularity way down with that of Washington politicians. With 2,014 adults surveyed, only 6% expressed “a lot of confidence” in the press.

 

That’s because they correctly view the major media as virtually indistinguishable from that same political establishment. No wonder that when Woodward himself began turning critical of the Obama administration, and questioned the president’s trustworthiness, the same media filled with reporters who wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein turned on their once-idolized elder statesman.

________

 

The failure of the fourth estate.