Some of you may have noticed that the “media industry”—newspapers and broadcast/cable news outlets—is losing credibility.
Only 16% of Americans said they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 2022, a 5% drop [or maybe, a 5 per centage point drop] compared to the 2021 findings, according to Gallup. It was the lowest number to give those answers since Gallup started asking about newspapers in 1973.
Television news has Americans even more concerned in 2022, as a dismal 11% told Gallup they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in the industry. This is down 5% […] from the 16% who were confident in TV news last year, a record-low total.
Joe Concha on the matter:
They can improve the situation by not injecting so much opinion into what should be straight reporting. And also by not automatically and blatantly taking a side on big issues such as the recent abortion ruling, or serving at the pleasure of one major political party like we saw by calling Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Instead, you might see some trust resorted, but it’s a hard bell to unring
Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor, a global news company that is expected to launch later this year:
We’re hoping that a commitment to transparency and openness to a range of views can help close that gap over time[.]
Hope isn’t much of a solution, here, not when it’s too late even for Concha’s solution: the same crop of dishonest journalists and media outlet editors and publishers would still be in place.
No, the required solution must include—must begin with—a significant fraction, a strong majority, of journalists must be terminated, and all of the media outlet managers and their deputies, and and all of the editors and their deputies, must be terminated, their ties to media “news” outlets completely severed. These are the ones proximately responsible for the distortions and outright lies they write, the editorial decisions they make to publish those stories and to minimize others or to spike them altogether. These are the ones that engage in rewriting their past stories rather than leaving them intact and publishing corrections to them. The incumbents can never be trusted, no matter the bodice-ripping mea culpas that might spill from their lips or pens.
It will take a considerable amount of time to accomplish—the firings needn’t take any time at all, but finding replacements—both capable of reporting and honest enough to do it objectively will take time.