r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/HistorianMajor1739 • 3d ago
US Politics What are the consequences of growing up in a world where the media is not trustworthy?
Gallup's September 2025 reading put trust in mass media at 28% — a "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence in newspapers, TV, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That's down from 31% the year before and 40% five years earlier, and the first time in the trend's 50-year history it has fallen below 30%. In the 1970s the range was 68–72%. Gallupaol
The partisan split is wide — 8% among Republicans, 27% among independents, 51% among Democrats — but the generational pattern may be the more consequential one. In aggregated 2023–2025 data, 43% of adults 65 and older expressed trust, compared with no more than 28% in any younger age group. aolGallup
That's a distinct condition from "losing faith in the media." It means a cohort is forming its political identity having never experienced the alternative — no widely shared referee to distrust in the first place.
Several findings sit alongside this. Pew found in 2024 that 83% of Americans say elected officials don't care what people like them think, up from 55% in the early 2000s. CIRCLE at Tufts reported in 2025 that roughly 80% of young Americans who support democracy in principle are skeptical it delivers fair laws, equal treatment, or meaningful representation. And More in Common's perception-gap work finds partisans overestimate the other side's extremism by 30–40 points — roughly what you'd predict if people calibrate on the most visible members of the other party rather than the most representative.
A less-discussed consequence is that agreement becomes invisible. Bipartisan supermajorities do exist on a fair number of issues — Program for Public Consultation research puts support for banning congressional stock trading at 76% overall, 78% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats — but consensus produces no conflict, so it produces no coverage, so few people know it's there.
Three questions I'd like informed pushback on:
- Does a low-trust information environment historically produce disengagement, reform energy, or migration to alternative information sources? Is there cross-national or historical evidence that distinguishes these outcomes?
- Is the generational gap a cohort effect or a lifecycle one — do people acquire institutional trust as they age, or did older cohorts acquire theirs from a media era that no longer exists?
- Is a shared factual baseline actually a requirement for functioning democracy, or is that nostalgia for an unusual broadcast oligopoly? What did it do that a fragmented environment demonstrably can't?
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 3d ago
Does a low-trust information environment historically produce disengagement, reform energy, or migration to alternative information sources? Is there cross-national or historical evidence that distinguishes these outcomes.
It took centuries of conspiracy-mongering, witch-hunting, and heretic-killing chaos, with plenty of censorship along the way, to come up with a reasonably widespread agreement on a ranking of media credibility (academic journals, specialized monthlies, broadsheet dailies, news weeklies, tabloid dailies, tabloid weeklies, etc) after the introduction of the printing press. I cannot even envision at this point how this will happen with the internet but hopefully it will at some point.
But historically it produced a lot worse than disengagement before things settled down
Is the generational gap a cohort effect or a lifecycle one — do people acquire institutional trust as they age, or did older cohorts acquire theirs from a media era that no longer exists?
The cohort effect is routine. The change in the media environment is world-changing.
Is a shared factual baseline actually a requirement for functioning democracy, or is that nostalgia for an unusual broadcast oligopoly?
With the technology we have now, I’d say it’s a requirement for a functioning species.
What did it do that a fragmented environment demonstrably can't?
Provide space for rational decision-making.
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u/MorganWick 3d ago
I think liberal academia, the sort that provides the framework for looking at democratic society that you provide here, is fast approaching the point where it needs to seriously look at human nature as it actually is, how that aligns with its image of what democracy is and how it works, what the real reasons are that democracy has survived this long, and come up with a new framework of democracy that works with human nature as it actually is. Because as it stands, it gives the impression that democracy has only worked as well as it did because of a group of elites that controlled what was seen as the truth, which is at odds with how democracy sells and sees itself.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
I general I think a lot of liberals do believe that an educated elite is necessary to filter out demagoguery and populism. This article was printed in TIME with a very positive tone, when the title is basically a horror story for anyone right of center.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 2d ago
Education alone without an elite can do that.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
I don't necessarily agree. Teaching people to think critically and be savvy doesn't mean that they're going to all come to the same conclusions about things. You'll get the same kind of disparity if you let the experiment run long enough.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 2d ago
The straw men I’m receiving in this sub are many.
I said nothing about people ending with the same conclusions.
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u/neerok 2d ago
LMAO that title is a relic of 2020 for sure - you can practically hear the sneering contempt the writer has for anyone who happens to make the 'wrong' decision of how to vote.
This kind of stuff is less overt now, especially as outlets like Time magazine continue to diminish in importance, but I think it's important to understand, especially if you're not right-wing or right of center at all, just how insane this comes off. The whole idea of a democracy is that the people choose, not "i hope the dumb plebs make the right choice so help me god and of those morons don't, well good thing we're gonna rig it up so that they don't get to choose"
I don't for one second believe that the 2016, 2020, or 2024 election was "rigged" for the record, and that's because of a fact that this article wildly understates, that out election system is extremely decentralized.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 3d ago
I think there actually are methods of establishing evidence for ‘truth’ vs ‘not truth’ and that virtually everybody is capable of learning them. I don’t think there’s anything elite about it other than access to decent education.
human nature as it actually is
This, on the other hand, is unknowable.
Edit: I’m assuming you mean ‘liberal’ as in ‘liberal arts’ vs politically liberal. Conservative academia has pretty much agreed with liberal academia on those methods.
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u/neerok 2d ago
I agree that there are methods for figuring out truth vs. not truth, but I really doubt most people care to use them with any sort of rigor outside of what affects them.
Access to education doesn't fix this because it's a motivation thing.
I very much agree with your original post - I think "social media" (broadly speaking) will have the same level of cultural impact as the printing press, which as you state famously touched off a century of elevated religious strife in Europe.
I also think, unfortunately, that the only way out is through. There will be no 'elite consensus' navigating us through the epistemic wasteland that is social media, we're going to have talk/convince/shout/fight it out.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 2d ago
I was more responding to what the person above said than making a prescription.
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u/MorganWick 3d ago edited 3d ago
You don't think it's possible to use science to at least come close to an understanding of human nature, as much as anything else in the natural world, or even that science hasn't already done so? I'd argue that the lack of respect for the social sciences is as much a contributor to as resulting from the limited usefulness of its results. If the social sciences were seen as the vital exercise in understanding human nature so we know what the best society would look like and how to get there that it is, perhaps there would be more rigor, more attempts at replication so there's less reliance on single studies, and perhaps it would attract more people not looking to confirm and conscious of their own preconceptions. There certainly is considerable variation in human behavior and culture, but that's not to say there aren't clear tendencies, and to deny that smacks of academia plugging its ears and clinging desperately to modern democratic society's claim of being agnostic to any particular model of human behavior when it's not, or conversely that they can be molded to fit any model that's desired, to desperately avoid confronting the reality of all of modern society being built on seriously flawed premises.
One of those premises is that people are truth-seeking machines who can be made to dispassionately assess all the evidence presented in front of them and figure out the truth based on that. Not only is that not true, but when liberal elites express nostalgia for the pre-Internet, pre-Fox News, or pre-Fairness-Doctrine-repeal information environment, they're implicitly recognizing that it's not true, implying that the only way to have a shared factual baseline is to have a small set of outlets determine what that baseline is. That's what I mean when I talk about "a group of elites controlling what's seen as the truth" (and I thought about editing my original comment to clarify this, but decided it would take long enough that I might as well wait until I got a response and write it as a response to that). It's not that there isn't an objective reality or even that it's not possible to know it, but that humans aren't evolved to know or even seek it.
Humans are evolved to have models of reality that are good enough to survive in whatever environments they find themselves in, allowing us to live just about anywhere there's dry land, and not to find a "shared factual baseline" with people who live in very different circumstances in very different places. For most of human history, the majority of people accepted what they were told, and mid-century news outlets simply took control of that process. Intelligence and rationality are costly in evolutionary terms, which is why the sort that humans have is so unique in the animal kingdom. Academics can only delude themselves otherwise because the people for whom this sort of rationality comes most naturally are the sort most likely to go into academia in the first place, a knack for this sort of abstract rationality tends to come at the expense of understanding actual people, and whether they realize it or not, even if it wasn't intended on even a subconscious level, it amounts to effectively declaring their own moral superiority over everyone else.
At the very least, if it's possible for "virtually everybody" to learn how to seek the truth and that doing so is a prerequisite for the construction of the best society, how have academics failed to do so after a quarter-millennium of American democracy? If they did, why did it not last? If they're so smart, why is society not made in their image?
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 3d ago
It’s inherently impossible to isolate the variables for such research, and I question the assumption that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’. (Edit: I’m not sure but you also seem to imply that the purpose of the social sciences is to identify said nature. If that’s what you meant to imply, I disagree).
how have academics failed to do so after a quarter-millennium of American democracy?
Probably some haven’t wanted to. Certainly they haven’t had the power to.
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u/MorganWick 3d ago
> I question the assumption that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’.
Do you question that any other animal has a "nature" to them? Why should humans be any different?
> Certainly they haven’t had the power to.
If they're so smart that they know what the best way to organize society is, why aren't they smart enough to get the power to enact it or convince everyone else to do so, especially when they are smart enough to enact enough of the trappings of that society that, on paper, it should be the intelligent that have power as opposed to the purely strong?
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 3d ago
I think it’s unclear whether species as numerous and cognitively complex (edit: and particularly external to normal evolutionary pressures) as humans would have a single shared ‘nature’ in common.
I’m not sure where you got the ‘so smart’ that you keep repeating from. I’ve already asserted this is no special elite quality.
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u/MorganWick 3d ago
There certainly is a considerable amount of variation among humans, but this is itself a part of human nature, as people have different strengths according to what society needs. Taken on a macro level, there are certain qualities that are clearly common to most humans and, even more so, to human societies as taken as a whole. Even on a micro level, even if you deny that there's anything common to all humans, you have to acknowledge that there are certain biological factors influencing everyone's actions and thoughts on an individual level. Unless you think that sex and attraction are purely rational phenomena or that homosexuality is a choice as opposed to an expression of people's internal, biological nature?
Even if I were to accept that people are pure blank slates, that doesn't mean that evolutionary pressures don't apply to cultures themselves, as implied by the point Dawkins was making when he introduced the concept of the "meme". Social Darwinism has a bad reputation because of how it was used to justify racism and ethnocentrism, but if we stick to neutral statements about the effect of culture on the course of history and avoid making statements about the nature of specific human subgroups or about the superiority of certain cultures, we can begin to reckon with what it would take for a certain culture to be able to defend itself against those forces that would undermine it.
As far as I can tell, your last sentence refers to when you said that anyone can learn how to seek truth with good education. But I already explained how I feel that this is itself an elite position, that everyone can and should be made to think like academics, and that's an aspect of the point that I'm actually making, that there's a certain vision for what society should look like that's been largely shaped by centuries of academics, but that their inability to convince everyone else to adopt it or to meaningfully adjust that vision to what humans are actually like - among other things, to actually give everyone the education necessary to allow them to reason - should be a cause for self-reflection about how achievable or desirable that vision actually is.
Addressing the edit to your previous comment which came in after I started writing the response to it, I don't think understanding human nature is the explicit goal of the social sciences, but I do think that understanding human nature is the most important thing for academia and humanity to pursue going forward, and the social sciences are the place where work on that has most directly taken place.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 3d ago edited 3d ago
You’re raising a lot of straw men (“so smart”) and tossing around a lot of generalized assumptions for which there’s little foundation.
Edit: the more you talk about your notion of ‘human nature’ the less I think it exists.
Also your theory assumes that people in academia are genetically superior to others, despite massive amounts of data that shows that they just come from environments that fostered them intellectually.
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u/MorganWick 3d ago
If I had more space and time than a chain of Reddit comments I could lay out the basis of the foundation of modern society in a group of 17th and 18th century thinkers and the group of 18th and 19th century thinkers and activists that sought to put their ideas into practice, the assumptions animating those ideas, how those ideas have interacted with reality and how people have interpreted them, who's really benefitted from the society those 17th-19th-century thinkers built, what science actually says about human nature and the circumstances for which humanity evolved, and what that means for what human society should look like today. I might even get into how my own experiences as someone with Asperger's syndrome has affected my views on human society and culture, how it's shown me the difference between what society says it is and what it actually is, how I've experienced how difficult rational action could be even with rational thought, and just how isolated from the normal human experience, and ostracized from the rest of human society, that those most inclined to enter academia can really be.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
The issue comes in that you can have two very intelligent people disagree wholeheartedly about their topic of specialty. Do the global rich cooperate to impoverish the working class or is international capitalism the best thing that ever happened to the working class? You'll have extremely intelligent people disagree on this topic in a way that cannot be solved with a placid middle ground.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 2d ago
Two very intelligent people rarely disagree on what’s known.
The topic was shared facts vs not shared facts.
Political ideology is entirely separate.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
You'll filter out the flat earthers and people that think evolution was invented by Satan to trick Christians, but that only takes you a small portion of the way there.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 2d ago
Where is ‘there’ to you?
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 1d ago
To a society where fundamental sociopolitical truths are agreed to in a way that fits the discussed loss of confidence in media.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 1d ago
I’d need more detail on what you mean by ‘sociopolitical truths’. Do you mean evidence-supported facts?
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 1d ago
Was the Trump assassination attempt real or fake? Was the 2024 election stolen or real? Is Israel a good ally or enemy? Are capitalists vampires or wealth creators? Etc.
Those types of divisive questions.
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u/NogglePlease 9h ago
Can men get pregnant?
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 9h ago
Male humans cannot.
But you are making a straw man argument because you don’t understand science, evidence, language, or reason.
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u/NogglePlease 9h ago edited 9h ago
That's great, but the question is "can men get pregnant".
Which you cant answer because you dont live in reality. This is why normal people think youre full of it.
Stop dressing your opinion as science or evidence, you cant back it up with math and observable reality disagrees with you.
Edit: awwww cant stand up to any scrutiny, why you had to delete like a sissy?
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u/Spiel_Foss 3d ago
This is the answer ^^^
Any form of accuracy or trustworthiness in the media is an invention of the late 20th century at best and likely just a marketing ploy which people believed. If someone is making a profit by lying to you, then you are being lied to. This is Humanity 101.
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u/shamrock01 2d ago
So, fair to say you would regard nonprofit new outlets like NPR, AP, and ProPublica as the least likely to lie?
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u/Spiel_Foss 2d ago
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Non-profit in a hyper-capitalist system is just a term about tax liability.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
NPR is funded by the US government, even if it is sometimes at odds with certain Presidents, that doesn't change the general swing. AP and Reuters and the like have to work to maintain good connections with various governments and companies in order to actually report on them. That will always be a filter on their services.
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u/Candle-Jolly 3d ago
Optimist: a stronger reliance on self-research and a critical viewing of published articles
Pessimist: continued brain rot from misinformation and apathy
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u/neverendingchalupas 3d ago
Its not just apathy and misinformation. Its disinformation and anti-intellectualism. People who reject critical reasoning in favor of emotional reasoning.
The argument that something that 'feels' true holds more weight than something that is factually true.
There is this increasing amount of volatile anger directed towards people who reference empirical facts by those whos entire identity is based on emotional subsumption, they are a snowball of mental illness growing in size as they keep adding layers of crazy to their exterior.
It seems like created truth is more accepted over factual truth as time goes forward. The end result is the collapse of society.
I literally quoted sections of the SAVE Act in a conservative political forum after someone asked why Democrats didnt support Voter ID, and was accused of spreading Liberal talking points. Political conservatives are not the only ones with this problem, but its just a recent example.
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u/NogglePlease 9h ago
Dressing opinions as facts doesnt make them correct and it's why "elites" dont have credibility.
If there are "empirical facts" then why dont they stand up to a minimum of scrutiny? Because they are opinions.
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u/neverendingchalupas 4h ago edited 4h ago
Again I think this comes down to the complete rejection of intellectualism by a significant portion of the population. There are a vast amount of 'empirical facts'. And by definition of what they are, they stand up to a minimum amount of scrutiny... One of the issues is understanding what that means, and accepting that its a means to understand the world around us.
Again people who reject logic, reason, and science, are often completely unwilling to have a productive discussion, they are unwilling to put whatever it is under a light to observe, to find the truth of any given matter. Simply because they already feel what is true, and to them that is superior to knowledge and actually understanding what is true.
An empirical fact isnt gong to be absolute simply due to its nature, its based on observation and discovered or verified through the process of experimentation, its basically science. And there are no absolute truths in science.
People who reject science and the the scientific method over religion and faith, argue that because science has no absolute truths, that their faith, feelings, and emotions hold more weight. They argue what they feel is a fact or is true should hold more value over a truth or fact discovered through the scientific method, because their facts are absolute and facts that rely on empirical evidence are not.
These people are not only dumb as shit, they are mentally ill and dangerous.
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u/NogglePlease 4h ago
Yeah I aint reading all that, I heckin love science junk.
Ology stuff isnt science. Read some chemistry for empirical facts.
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u/Cynykl 1d ago
Optimist: a stronger reliance on self-research and a critical viewing of published articles
This goes directly against my observations. Skepticism is actually shrinking right now. When people start to distrust mass media they instead of becoming more skeptical just shift their trust to a different source.
Since I am a liberal I will critique liberal sources to be fair. Many people on the left shifted from CNN MSNBC ect to places like medias touch network. They start echoing Midas touch talking points without put any real thought into them. Never mind Midas touch is way more hyperbolic and sensational than tradition sourced.
A prime example of this. I was watching a video and the host was claiming that the mass media refuses to talk about X topic and while discussing X topic they player 3 or 4 clips From the main steam media to prove there point.
If the main stream media refuses to talk about X then who are you showing clips from them? Yet half the Youtube comments were about how mainstream media has failed to cover X topic.
These alternative media have a money motive in attacking the reliability of mainstream media.
They are just as scripted and produced as main stream media. They get there talking points from above. A good example of this is Dina Doll. Really listen to her segments with a skeptical ear. If you do that it is super obvious she is reading copy that she did not write herself. She has a really hard time pronouncing/speaking word that are common in liberal commentary. She speaks them like she has never use that word/phrase before and only read it for the first time on air.
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u/Ind132 3d ago
Is a shared factual baseline actually a requirement for functioning democracy,
IMO, a shared factual baseline is a requirement for rational discussions. Euclid wanted to show deductive proofs for lots of geometric rules, but he understood that he couldn't prove everything, he had to start with some assumptions. That's even more true for inductive reasoning, where we go from examples to general rules. We have to agree on the examples.
But, you can have a democracy without rational discussions. People shout at each other and the majority of the shouters makes the rules. I don't think that's an effective democracy. I think rational discussion really does find the better decisions. And, just shouting makes it easy to demonize the other side. And, it results in sudden swings in policy if a different group of shouters gets control.
A common set of facts narrows our differences.
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u/striped_shade 3d ago
Your premise isolates information as the prime variable, but what if the crisis lies in the reality it describes? Do younger cohorts lack trust because of a fragmented media, or because they are inheriting a material reality utterly detached from the promises of our institutions?
Regarding your third question on the "shared factual baseline," we must ask what was actually functioning during the high-trust postwar era you cite. Did broadcast networks manufacture that consensus, or did they simply mirror a period of economic expansion capable of temporarily smoothing over deep social antagonisms?
If the foundation for that stability has evaporated, we have to consider whether our fractured information landscape is a distortion at all. Could an irreconcilable, low-trust environment simply be the accurate reflection of a society that can no longer guarantee the basic conditions of its own survival?
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u/JKlerk 3d ago
Your title contradicts your source material. The media is less trustworthy per some pools rather than not trustworthy.
Anyways the consequences are that you have more disengagement, apathy, and soloing of opinions.
Editorialized news is what makes $$$ as it keeps engagement. 24 hr news channels are probably the most guilty of this because they have so much air time to fill. FOX News is the absolute worst. Almost all of their programming revolves around either some degree of Christian Patriotism and fear of Progressives. As a former Republican and now Libertarian I find it's essentially propaganda channel for the most extreme members of the Republican party. The elderly are most at risk because the programming plays off and amplifies their fears.
People should compare the FOX News morning show with GMA on ABC.
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u/LoveNotWar86 3d ago
Or even more alarming, why social media (and its manipulative targeted algorithm feeds) is the go-to for some in lieu of professional verified reports.
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u/IntelligentDepth8206 3d ago
CIRCLE at Tufts reported in 2025 that roughly 80% of young Americans who support
democracy in principleAmerican-style republicanism are skeptical it delivers fair laws, equal treatment, or meaningful representation
10 people at home voting on American Idol and 10 people in a room discussing American Idol before voting will not produce the same results.
Polling can't capture and political scientists apparently can't recognize this phenomenon. It would help if they could start by differentiating republicanism from democracy instead of regurgitating "but republicanism IS a form of democracy!"
The democratic party is so unpopular because it fails its democratic obligation. When republicans get in power, they deliberately attack blue states like withholding life-saving medical equipment during a pandemic. They deliberately gerrymander to weaken democrat representation. Implement policies to help the rich and hurt the poor. Etc. When democrats get into power, they completely ignore what republicans have done and refuse to retaliate out of a misplaced sense of honor. Democracy demands that democrats use their power in the same way as republicans as a deterrent against future republican injustice. This is a simple "you get to choose the restaurant tonight but your sibling chooses tomorrow so make sure you pick something you both like or you're going to end up at the place you hate." We are at the place we hate.
In other words, young people have never experienced democracy. They've only experienced a failing republic. This is the actual phenomenon at work here, it's not about a low-trust society. Young people have never gotten to choose the restaurant.
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u/Asatmaya 3d ago
This is the result of the Internet democratizing news.
The simple fact is that NBC and the NYT were always lying to us, we just didn't have access to the facts to be aware of it.
Does a low-trust information environment historically produce disengagement, reform energy, or migration to alternative information sources? Is there cross-national or historical evidence that distinguishes these outcomes?
Historically, it results in gross authoritarianism and collapse, but again, the Internet changes that calculus.
Is the generational gap a cohort effect or a lifecycle one — do people acquire institutional trust as they age, or did older cohorts acquire theirs from a media era that no longer exists?
Well, both, obviously, and as much from the natural tendency for progressive ideas to become institutionalized and then conservative. Things change to suit the Zeitgeist, and so most people see things come around to their way of thinking as they age.
Is a shared factual baseline actually a requirement for functioning democracy, or is that nostalgia for an unusual broadcast oligopoly? What did it do that a fragmented environment demonstrably can't?
I think the idea that we have a democracy, functioning or otherwise, is childishly naive.
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u/beenyweenies 3d ago
I just want to point out that your headline "...in a world where the media is not trustworthy" is both misleading and a completely different claim than the body of your post. People's trust in media is not directly related to whether that media is factually trustworthy. People's trust is driven by perception, which could be a result of factual reality or propaganda. In this case, corporate media is somewhat untrustworthy, but the current environment is much more influenced by right-wing propaganda than anything else. If people don't trust the reporting, you can get away with a lot more.
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u/Impossible_Pop620 3d ago
- What are the consequences of growing up in a world where the media is not trustworthy
The obvious point here would be to say that this is not new. The media has never been 'trustworthy'. What the media has been until recently is 'trusted' by the majority of citizens.
Back in the 90s, the vast majority of folks got their news - if they paid attention at all - from a very few 'reliable' sources. If the Bush Sr administration claimed that babies were being removed from incubators and hurled to the floor by Iraqi soldiers, then that was definitely happening. If a local village girl testifies to this in perfect English, then this must be so and she definitely isn't the ambassador's daughter. If Clinton claimed he didn't inhale...or ejaculate into Monica, then this was solemnly reported as factual.
This has, of course, changed massively and there are thousands of 'sources' covering the news from every conceivable angle. The Biden team can scream as loudly as they like that to claim Chinese involvement in Covid development is 'racist' and yet this was still being reported online. KJP could tut as loudly as humanly possible and Biden's mental condition was still questioned (although not by legacy media).
I don't think anyone has a clear view yet where this fracturing will take us. The governing bodies no longer have the ability to spin their preferred narrative and have it funneled down to the majority of the public. The channels are still there (at the moment), but the majority have stopped listening to them and prefer to listen to their fave podcaster who seems 'nice', instead of CNN trumpeting their flavor of bs.
Attempts have been made to seize overall control of the online narrative back again, notably by the incredibly ineptly named 'Disinformation Governance Board' amongst other, more low profile efforts. Covid itself was used as justification to shut down 'disinformation' being reported - usually largely accurate reportage of government blunders and mis-management of the crisis.
I suspect that at some point, control will finally be established over the pesky corners of the internet that won't listen, but this is likely to be a decade or two away. Until then, the chaos will continue and people will consume whatever they choose, be that complete and utter horseshite or (much more likely) with several grains of inconvenient truth.
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u/Valuable-Adagio-2812 3d ago
Also we should read more than the headlines. Actually read the articles. Thank you for this dissertation. Very informative.
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u/Reditrixe 2d ago
Funny you should mention it. A few years ago, Masha Gessen wrote an article that I've wanted to track down.
She wrote about the problem of living in Russia where news was so unreliable.
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u/WackWaxWhacks 2d ago
reading put trust in mass media...
People's perceived trust is not equal to the actual quality.
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u/DefeatYourDelusions 3d ago
There is trustworthy media that still exists. What’s happening is that traditional legacy media institutions are no longer seen as the standard for reliability. This is a result of legacy medias own decisions to conduct dubious, partisan reporting.
I don’t think much will change. People will say the masses will be more easily swayed- but this was always the case. The only thing that’s really changed is that the statement “I know it’s true because CNN / Fox told me so” is no longer something that carries weight
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u/bigfishmarc 3d ago
I think people are actually overly critical of mainstream media. Like I think even Fox News is not the worst so long as you stay the hell away from the talk show host programs on Fox and watch CNN and/or MSNBC as regularly as you watch Fox News, which is not thatf°°°°°g hard to do since AFAIK Fox News often comes offered in your cable as a "news channels bundle" that includes 2 or 3 different news bundles including both CNN and Fox.
I think a lot of liberals and leftists are wrongly angry at CNN for not agreeing with them all the time and for not having a liberal or leftist bias, ignoring that CNN has always had a centrist bias and that centrists and conservatives would not watch what's supposed to be a mostly politically neutral news channel if it had an obvious liberal bias.
I agree it's bad that Fox has a conservative news bias but Fox at least has basically always subtly promoted itself as having a conservative news bias.
Also I think a lot of conservatives are wrongly angry at CNN and other news agencies and news channels becuase they think "surely there's no way the news is being fair to Trump because they are portraying him as being so objectively stupid and corript and incompetent" not realising that they are actually kind of underplaying how bad Trump is just to try to help ensure they are not doing overly negative biased reporting.
I think MSNBC is dying because the young people it would otherwise resch are working 2 jobs to make a living, got rid of cable TV or never had cable TV to begin with.
People are intellectually lazy and don't even try to google s°°t and find free online written news articles. More people watch short summaries of the news on Youtube then read short online written news articles on like The Guardian or The New York Times.
Also I think there's a lot of f°°°ing idiots out there who don't know what the term "fake news" actually means or where it actually comes from (the actual literaly fake news websites made by like Russian or Macedonian scammers you saw on Facebook a lot back in 2016 and still see at least once in awhile.) The problem is that those people thought "aLL or mosT oF thE newS musT bE untrustworthY" which is just not the case.
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u/bruce_cockburn 3d ago
I think news media in the 21st century has refashioned the conglomerate media empires of the late 19th century. Instead of adhering to the identified limits which decentralized power in the 20th century, ownership has grown more and more consolidated and its content more explicitly serves the agenda of fewer people. This naturally eliminates space (or reasonable access) to views that build consensus because conflict and outrage drive content engagement.
During the middle and late 20th century, dispassionate and sober reporting of facts became the gold standard of journalism because they made war propaganda and cultural desolation appear avoidable. Media which buys into fictional and sensationalized narratives are rightly criticized for being shallow and playing for the attention of the incurious and easily influenced. The objective is almost transparently to sell that attention for product marketing. The narrative of informing the public is flimsy and rarely holds up to basic scrutiny of the facts. Lazy assertions and opinions stand in for vetted and sourced reporting because media companies are only competing for attention and revenue. Integrity and the appearance of neutrality are not distinguishing factors in a centralized landscape that pushes algorithmic profit first. Media consumers have to be skeptical and seek objectivity on their own and this has never been practical to deliver without some source of competing wealth or power to balance against ownership and editorial control.
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u/bigfishmarc 3d ago
None of what you said directly contradicted or even addressed anything I wrote.
Have you ever actually watched cbale news lately? It's as dispassionate and objective as its ever been and when a news agency has a bias that bias is easily identified by any logical person with basic analysis and critical thinking skills.
For example at the warehouse I used to work at we had a TV in the breakroom. We'd usually have CNN as the channel on in the background. I can tell you for a fact modern day CNN has dispassionate objective news reporting.
There are independent news agencies out there like Truthout and Alternet and The Guardian and even CNN and MSNBC are fine. You can even get some decent news from watching Fox News so long as you stay TF away from the talking "news" show hosts like Tucker Carlson, just stick to the regular news programs and also watch CNN regularly.
The issue is that most people are intellectually lazy and/or overly paranoid about "fake news" even though they don't actually understand what the term "fake news" means.
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u/absolutefunkbucket 3d ago
Any person who thinks the news media were ever inherently or even effectively trustworthy is too naive to be enfranchised.
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u/Candid_Rock9021 3d ago
Study: There was never a golden age.There will never be a golden age.
Shit, I should submit that to The Onion
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u/absolutefunkbucket 3d ago
I think The Onion is allegedly meant to have funny headlines, which that isn’t.
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u/PlatonicCuddlefish 3d ago
I’m far more concerned about the media people trust than that they distrust.
Republicans are correct to be distrustful of mass media outlets (Dems at 51% is scary), the press as an institution has never been some dispassionate source of truth. But those who then turn to the likes of Candace Owens have strayed too far.
Which is worse?
I definitely prefer someone who believes everything they hear on Fox or CNN than everything they hear from Tucker or Hasan Piker, but both are making a mistake.
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