It’s far too early to predict which party will win next year’s election, but not too early to announce the national media as a clear loser in terms of national influence and prestige.
Pew reports that millennials have become as negative about major media as older generations, with their rate of approval dropping from 40% in 2010 to 27% today. Gallup tracks a similar pattern, finding 70% losing trust in the media, including nearly half of Democrats.
As Trump backers never cease to point out, the Mueller report undermined the supposedly rock solid case for “collusion.” Whatever the truth, a solid majority of Americans believe the Russiagate brouhaha was politically motivated. Some progressives, like Rolling Stone’s contributing editor Matt Taibbi, believe Mueller represents “a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”
Ironically, Trump, the man the media wanted to bring down, was largely their creation. At a party in 2016, my wife and I were regaled by a CNN account executive crowing about the company’s strategy of using Trump rallies, at the exclusion of others, to boost ratings. Once having created President Frankenstein, CNN then tried to keep up the ratings by chronicling his disposal — this worked for MSNBC which, unlike CNN, never much pretended to be an objective network. Today, CNN’s audience share has fallen below not only leader Fox, but MSNBC, Home and Garden, Discovery and Food networks.
-Joel Kotkin (THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICA’S MEGA-MEDIA)
I’ve been saying this for years and have been putting up polls that have been negative towards the media for years. They’ve brought this upon themselves and because they’ve shown their true partisan colors these past few years, the downward spiral process has only accelerated. True, the Internet has been a disruptive mechanism but people made their choices due to enhanced competition. Like many on the Left, it seems they can’t compete (re: why do you think that the teachers unions hate competition and have been trying to get rid of scholastic competition like no valedictorians, changing grading system to ones that no one understands, institute curriculum that are openly partisan, and actively are trying to subvert parental authority? Substantial competition such as “tax money following the child” would change all that in a heartbeat).
Couldn’t happen to a worser industry.
