Media and the public in America .. Lost confidence

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In parallel with the increasing ease of dissemination of information and news in recent years, the confidence of the public in the most open and advanced media, and even the prestigious media institutions, is collapsing, so that countering the 'false' media has become a successful means of propaganda in the election campaigns, and confidence does not seem to return soon.

According to a study by Ipsos last year, the United States leads the world in spreading false news, followed by Russia and China. 86% of Internet users admit that they have fallen victim to rumors, especially those on social media.

But the finger-pointing is not solely directed at the networking sites, whose owners in Silicon Valley have recently sought campaigns against the proponents of lies on their pages. Trust in the media is no better.

In its 2019 edition, the Columbia Journal of Journalism, published by Columbia University in New York, published the results of a poll revealing the depth of the gap between the public and the media, prompting many large media to highlight the study.

It is remarkable that the researchers asked more than 4,200 Americans their confidence in the most important sources of information, the confidence was high to low in the following order: the military, law enforcement, universities, the Supreme Court, the executive (the White House), Congress, and finally media.

When asked whether journalists and reporters could receive money to draft news and reports in a certain direction, 60% said they were convinced that this would happen, and 56% said the country was getting worse in terms of media confidence.

Historical collapse
Perhaps the most common comparable indicator for decades is the data provided by the Gallup Foundation since the 1970s. In 1972, 68% of Americans trusted the media. The figure rose to 70% in 1976, and then began to decline.

When the institution re-asked its questions two decades later, it found that trust in the media collapsed to 53%, and stabilized at this level until around 2003, when the official and informal mobilization of the vast war on so-called terrorism, no longer trust Americans to inform them more than half Since the beginning of the millennium, it reached only 40% in 2012, then to its lowest level in 2016 at 32%.

Although some optimism revived the media the following year, confidence has not reached half the threshold yet, writes Jeff Galloway, an analyst at Gallup. Jones last year wrote an article on the foundation's website, praising the relative recovery of this collapsed trust.

Jones said the recovery appears more when we separate left and right.Democratic confidence rose in 2018 to 76%, the highest among Democrats in 20 years. Confidence among independents rose to 42% as the best result since 2005. But Republican confidence remains always low, last year only 21%, although better than in 2016, 14%.

This recovery in the Republicans' confidence in the media is probably due to President Donald Trump's ongoing campaign of what he calls fake media, as he seems to have succeeded in playing on the collapse of media confidence in the right-wing camp to make his declared war one of the most important elements of his campaign. Election, a war that continues to attract Hamas supporters to this day.

Jones based his optimism on a Gallup and Knight poll in which a majority of Americans polled said they still believe the media has an important role in democracy, and that even those who asserted a loss of trust in the media believe that trust can be restored.

Established institutions
In August 2018, the Simmons Foundation published the results of a poll of Americans' confidence in the most important media, and it was notable that the most reliable means did not get the trust of more than 57.7% of the respondents of more than two thousand people, the Wall Street Journal.

Then came the channel "ABC" by 55.9%, the channel "CBS" (55.4%), followed by the channel "BBC" (55.2%), then the magazine "Forbes" and "NBC" (54%), followed by The New York Times and The Washington Post with close convergence rates of more than 53.5%.

He pointed out that major institutions such as Reuters, Bloomberg, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Economist and others have not been able to achieve up to 50% reliability among Americans.

Although declining confidence in the media has become a global, and especially Western, problem, the comparison between reality in America and other Western countries reveals a striking disparity.

In Britain, a survey by the Pew Institute for Statistics in late 2017 revealed that 79% of Britons trust the BBC, followed by ITV with 74%, and Sky by a remarkable margin. 55%, followed by the Guardian, which received no more than half confidence.

When it comes to more popular media outlets like the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, or emerging ones like the Half Post, public trust has only increased by a third, although some have relied on their new image as rebellious new media tweeting out of the flock of traditionally associated institutions. The interests of governments and influencers.

The poll also found that trust is sometimes tied to the orientation of the public. Confidence in the Guardian on the left rises to 69%, compared to 46% on the right.