Sunday, December 31, 2017

Poynter: Americans Think Media Makes Up Stories on Trump

Republicans are the most skeptical, unsurprisingly.

12.29.2017

A massive survey 2,100 adult Americans carried out by the Poynter Institute finds trust in the media is not what it should be.

While the finding that 49% of Americans believe that the media reports the news, "fully, accurately and fairly," the more shocking revelation is that so many American believe the news media actually invent stories:

Disturbingly, the Poynter survey found nearly half of Americans — 44 percent — believe the press invents negative stories about the president, including 74 percent of Republicans.

Poynter, a journalism think tank, acknowledges that having just shy of half of Americans thinking the media makes up stories about President Donald Trump is problematic but then points the finger of blame squarely at the audience rather than at the media:

The finding should be a fire alarm for newsrooms; a widespread, fundamental misunderstanding among the public of what we do points to an urgent need to be more transparent about how and why we report news. Remedies to begin restoring audience trust include annotating stories and linking original documents and images to show how we know what we know, and publishing reports and videos taking the audience step-by-step through ethical standards, methods, sourcing and fact-checking.

Poynter also makes sure to take a swipe at Donald Trump for the fall in the trust in news media:

Distrust of the news media didn’t start with Donald Trump, but he has amplified and stoked those doubts like no American president before him. Trump is also not the first politician to discredit any negative reporting on him, but his effort to undermine a shared understanding of facts conveyed in fair, vetted reporting takes a page from the playbooks of authoritarians in China, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.

It seems Poynter never heard of the Obama administration attacking media outlets it disagreed with or using the Espionage Act to target journalists and their sources.