Doing the Job of the Press

For John, BLUF:  The Press, as the Fourth Estate, has a function in our system of government.  That function is to hold the politicians to daily account for their actions.  Some think it is failing in that function.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Echo Chamber Era

Here is the sub-headline:

Trust in media is down, but if journalists don't listen to critics anyway, why should they care?

From TK News, by Reporter Matt Taibbi, 22 January 2021.

Here is the lede plus four:

A day after Joe Biden's inauguration, the headline in Axios read:  “Trust in media hits a new low.”  Felix Salmon wrote that “for the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media.”  The Edelman survey showed overall trust in the press dropping to 46%.

The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that Republicans hate the press a lot, but Democrats just a little.  The Axios story bore this out somewhat, as only 18% of Republicans reported trusting media, versus 57% of Democrats.

Still, 57% of half your potential audience is nothing to brag about, when you’re in the trust business.  Other numbers, like 56% of respondents believing journalists are “purposely trying to mislead people,” or 58% thinking that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology… than with informing the public" are more ominous.

Media critics who work in the corporate press, like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, seem determined to look everywhere but inward for solutions.  The dominant legend in our business is that if Republicans believe in fairy tales like Q and “Stop the Steal,” the traditional press can do nothing but stand its ground.

Sullivan’s reaction to at-times “embarrassing” Inauguration Day coverage was an injunction to reporters to resist the temptation to try to appear more balanced by showing “toughness” with regard to the incoming Biden regime.  If anything, Sullivan said, the press should stand even taller in its opposition to red-state lie merchants like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, “without fearing that they’d be called partisan.”

Matt Taibbi has been a reporter for some time, and is good at it.  I have always viewed him as a Progressive.  I think his Progressive insights inform his reporting, but do not get in the way of his reporting the objective facts.

Regards  —  Cliff