Just when you thought public trust in the mainstream news media couldn't get any worse, a majority of Americans now see the media as their adversary. A new Rasmussen Reports survey of likely voters finds 59 percent either strongly agree or somewhat agree that the media is "truly the enemy of the people." That includes nearly 8-in-10 Republicans, more than half of Independents, and nearly half of Democrats. The other metrics in the survey were equally bad for the media establishment. More than half of all voters believe the media is biased toward Democrats, only one-third trust the media to fairly and accurately report the news, and just 7 percent have a "great deal" of confidence in the media.
The rapid decline of trust in the news media is not necessarily a shock, considering the drastic difference in their coverage of President Trump and President Biden. But it should serve as a wake-up call to newsrooms across the country. "The press is supposed to be surrogates for the public," says Jeff McCall, media studies professor at DePauw University. "And when the public says the press is the enemy of the people, what we're really saying is the media are no longer our surrogates, that they don't speak for us or represent us."
McCall tells KTRH most of the problems with the corporate media stem from an abandonment of basic journalistic principles. "There was a time when as journalists, we tried to look at stories by what news value they had, we tried to go where the facts led us...and we're not at that place anymore," he says. "Because too much of the media now is agenda-driven."
That agenda is largely driven by the coastal elites who now run most of the corporate media. "I think it's pretty clear that the people in those corporate media towers do not understand the people throughout most of the United States, including in Texas or in Indiana where I'm from," says McCall.
Still, distrust in media extends far beyond flyover country. "When you see a majority of Independents and even a lot of Democrats saying they don't trust the press like they used to either, I think that shows that even they understand that having a biased media doesn't really serve the needs of anybody across the political spectrum," says McCall.