Commentary
President's 'Fake News' Campaign Is Working, Albeit Mostly Among His Supporters
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, December 12, 2019
He began his presidency by declaring war on the U.S. news media and spent the first three years of his time in office labeling America's top journalists "fake news," and the President's tactics appear to have worked, at least as far as Republican voters are concerned. That's the finding of an in depth report released today by the Pew Research Center.
The analysis, which explored more than 50 of its American Trends Panel Surveys to tease out what factors drive trust in the news media, found that nearly a third (31%) of Republicans or Republican-leaning independent voters believe journalists have "low ethical standards," while only 5% of Democrats feel that way.
"The link between the public’s approval of Trump and views of the news media is clear in evaluations of journalists’ ethics," the authors of Pew's "Trusting the News Media in the Trump Era" write, adding, "Trump’s strongest approvers, though, express even greater suspicion: 40% of Republicans who strongly approve of Trump’s job performance say journalists’ ethics are that low. That is true of far fewer Republicans who only somewhat approve of Trump or disapprove of him: 17% and 12%, respectively.1 Overall, this relationship between support for Trump and depressed trust in the news media persists over a range of attitudes. And, taken together, Republicans who are most approving of Trump and Democrats who are least approving of him stand far apart from each other."
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Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
Trump's so-called declared war on mainstream media news was preceded a few months in 2016 by a new lynch mob kind of journalism, spurred by an angry Left. The results were not pretty in 2017, when public editor Liz Spayd was fired by the New York Times for being insufficiently anti-Trump. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/06/new-york-times-public-editor-liz-spayd-fired-media-bias/
My confidence in journalists remains high.
My confidence in media commentators and media owners, not so much.
I remember nearly every hour of the day after Trump was elected, MSNBC and CNN telling their audience that Trump was a Russian agent of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. This turned out this week to be false. Trump earn the right to call members of the press "fake".
Joe, one very real comparison that you can related too. I receive every week of the "fake" scham sweepstakes send to me to publish. For 16 years, I go through the emails glance at them to see who they are from. Most get spammed right off the bat. Some get research for theirvalidation. Last the real ones like Ford Motor Co. and many Fortune companies will get a return email from me.
The point here is while most in the media publish wouldn't consider my publishing sweepstakes and contest as entertainment, I check and validate who is real and who is fake.
Most of the "Fake News" as described didn't validate the Russian story and what they did check to see what was real and what was not.
Trump was the messenger of what he knew that was fake news.