Last week we learned from the new Wall St. Journal/NBC poll that the most unpopular group in politics today is the Republicans in Congress.
While Pres. Obama has the approval of just under half the respondents in the poll, and congressional Democrats have a troubling 33 percent approval among voters, the Boehner-McConnell team in Congress is at an all time low of 24 percent.
Now a new Gallup finds that the news media is just 1 point more popular with the public than congressional Republicans, 25 percent/24 percent:
Americans continue to express near-record-low confidence in newspapers and television news — with no more than 25 percent of Americans saying they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either. These views have hardly budged since falling more than 10 percentage points from 2003-2007….
Americans’ confidence in newspapers and television news is on par with Americans’ lackluster confidence in banks and slightly better than their dismal rating of Health Management Organizations and big business.
The decline in trust since 2003 is also evident in a 2009 Gallup poll that asked about confidence and trust in the “mass media” more broadly. While perceptions of media bias present a viable hypothesis, Americans have not over the same period grown any more likely to say the news media are too conservative or too liberal.
The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll also found that tea baggers are slightly less popular than congressional Democrats — 30 percent/33 percent — and for the first time more people had an unfavorable opinion of tea baggers than favorable, 34 percent/30 percent.
The players in the MSM have no one to blame except themselves. I grew up in the Murrow-Brinkley-Cronkite days of reporting when journalists didn’t shy away from the truth. Of course, there was also less corporate control in the MSM at that time.
I understand exactly why the majority of Americans distrust the MSM after watching how the MSM refused to do any real reporting on why we were invading Iraq, how the financial industry was wrecking the economy, and the effect the policies of the Bush II administration would have on the country.
We still see the MSM refusing to inform the public and choosing to parade a series of “experts” before the public on teevee and in print whose only agenda is to profit from a personal/political POV. That Palin can post something to her Facebook page and have it become a huge part of the mainstream media’s reporting is an example of the MSM not doing its job. Politico copying and pasting Dick Cheney’s screeds without analyzing any of them is another example. That the Washington Post has Mark Thiesen publishing his special brand of BS with their permission is another example.
The largest newspaper in my state, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, allows the same kind of practices. My hometown paper is no longer worth reading. Anything having to do with President Obama’s many accomplishments is buried in the back pages of the newspaper, and the editorial pages contain only articles written by rw authors that suffer from ODS. It is also amazing that the two most published rw writers are African Americans. As many conservative political writers as there are in this country, I simply don’t believe that the choice of these two men is a mistake.
Make that BRAINSTEM media.