Democrats’ trust in the press has fallen to its lowest reading in 50 years.
Democrats’ trust in the press has fallen to its lowest reading in 50 years.
T he “resistance” sugar high that the press enjoyed following Donald Trump’s first election is well and truly over.
The latest, and perhaps most definitive, evidence is that confidence in the media among Democrats has fallen to its lowest point in 50 years.
Yet the media show no sign of having noticed any of this. They still report as if Hillary Clinton’s defeat was yesterday, oblivious to the collapse in credibility felt by their core audience, which is also the target audience for “resistance” news coverage.
Trump’s political ascent and subsequent election was, to borrow from former CBS chief executive Les Moonves, “damn good” for the press. He was unlike anything the country had seen, and a stunned public wanted answers. Ratings skyrocketed. Subscriptions boomed. CNN even bet viewers would pay good money for a streaming service named, unimaginatively, CNN+.
The times were good, but they were not designed to last.
The problem with much of the news coverage after the 2016 election was that it abandoned the ruthless competence of impartial fact-seeking, always a valuable commodity, for the temporary premise that the press and the Democrats were “in it together,” and that together they would end the bad man’s reign. And, boy, did newsrooms embrace the role. They threw in with such gusto that “news reporting” soon became “resistance” fan fiction.
The short-term gains were immense. Viewership surged and Democratic trust in media rose from 51 percent in 2016 to a record 76 percent in 2018, its highest since Gallup started tracking these numbers in 1976.
That was then. Trump is in his second term as president. Gallup now puts Democratic confidence in media at just 50 percent, the lowest rating in 50 years.
The problem with the “resistance” news model was that it incentivized serving audiences only what they wanted, and nothing else. What audiences needed, including unpleasant facts, would’ve killed the golden goose. Thus, newsrooms treated every half-baked conspiracy and crackpot activist as if they deserved a hearing, elevating the worst people imaginable for no other reason than they were willing to trash Trump. Meanwhile, facts that challenged or upended “resistance” fantasies earned scant attention, if any at all.
It wasn’t long before the news cycles became clichés. You remember the greatest hits: The walls are closing in. Trump rages. He is unraveling. He is fuming. He is isolated. This is the end for him. A decade later, the only thing the dozens of “Trump is finished” news cycles have to show for all their bluster is Michael Avenatti in an orange jumpsuit.
Some of the collapse in Democratic confidence may reflect a sense that the press is more “right-wing” than it was in 2016, but that’s a bit of a stretch, and it doesn’t account for a decline so sharp. The likelier reason is that Democrats simply can’t see past the fact that the press’s campaign to “resist” proved as useless as it was embarrassing, both politically and professionally. Media failed in the effort to eject Trump from the White House and, in the process, behaved in a way that was glaringly sloppy and unprofessional. There’s really no quick and easy way to come back from that kind of reputational damage.
Yet, despite all this, despite the current newsroom shake-ups, the plummeting subscription and viewer numbers, and even the loss of confidence from their core audience, major newsrooms still act as if it were 2016, and as if flimsy commentary and scaremonger headlines are going to pay big dividends. Consider last week alone:
Major media, from the Los Angeles Times to The Guardian, claimed that Trump had invited Iran to “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego in nuclear strikes. Trump didn’t say that. Though his meaning was jumbled, it’s pretty obvious he was defending higher gasoline prices amid the ongoing war with Iran, saying the alternative — the nuking of U.S. cities by a nuclear Iran — would obviously be much worse.
People, we’ve been covering this man as president for a decade. We’ve been over this. Are we really still trying to squeeze scare headlines from his meandering and hyperbolic speech style? (The funny thing is: you don’t have to force it. Give him five minutes, and he will say something that is actually newsworthy.)
On October 7, ABC News published a report claiming companies tied to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had secured more than $6 billion in government contracts. Later that day, the story had vanished. Poof! No correction. No editor’s note. Just a blank page and the denials of the story’s subjects. ABC even pulled the social media posts promoting the report.
After more than a day of silence, the network restored a version of the story with a different headline, a different thesis, key claims removed, and the $6 billion figure gone. Even the byline changed: the original author, Nathan Lee, was replaced by “ABC NEWS.”
An editor’s note now reads: “A version of this story published on Oct. 7 contained errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies. After subsequent reporting, this version contains corrected information and additional context regarding some of those investments, contracts and events.”
This has got to be the most creative workaround anyone has ever devised to avoid retracting a faulty report. Points for ingenuity and effort.
Elsewhere, in the unintentionally funnier parts of legacy media, former NBC News host Chuck Todd blamed Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for mumps cases among San Diego State University athletes, saying, “Good job Bobby Kennedy Jr. — now your bizarre views have impacted college football.”
Obviously, any of the athletes’ vaccination decisions would have been made by parents when the athletes were infants and long before RFK Jr. was anywhere near a government post. In fact, the most notable anti-vaxxers when these athletes were children were loony tune Hollywooders, including Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. But there’s no political profit in blaming ol’ rubber face.
This style of reporting was boring the first time around. The difference now is that Democrats have less faith in the organizations and people making the claims. This isn’t to say Democrats aren’t still adamantly, sometimes violently, anti-Trump. It’s to say the fantasy wish-casting and scaremongering that defined the post-2016 “resistance” news no longer has the Democratic audience it once did.
But our press doesn’t seem to have gotten the message — they’re still in 2016 mode.