© Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
There's a plus and a minus right off the top since Fox News is a problem ... but ... it's not the only one. That general theme continues through the article.
Nearly two-thirds of US voters believe that the mainstream media is producing fake news, according to a new poll. Many also believe that fake news is purposely published to push an agenda. Fox News appears to be hurt the most by viewers’ mistrust.
Across the political spectrum, 65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media, including 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats, according to the latest Harvard-Harris poll provided exclusively to The Hill. In total, 84 percent of voters said it is hard to know what news to believe online.
Russia Today: Fox News’ ratings slide as Americans’ mistrust of mainstream media grows
There's all the cognitive dissonance you could possibly want and it splits along partisan lines to send it to absurdity leaving the only commonality in confusion.
It's not particularly concerning to see Fox News ratings have dropped significantly since they have been far ahead of CNN for quite a while. It's likely CNN ratings have dropped as well but it wouldn't have been so dramatic in terms of numbers but may be revelatory in the percentage.
When we see more belief in CNN than Fox then we have a problem since that shows they're still not really getting it with fake news when both distort it tremendously by omission and also exaggeration of content such as all the hoopla whenever the Pentagon comes up with another squillion-dollar weapon.
There's no single fit for all the mistrust but the overall view is there's one hell of a lot of it since a primary foundation of the American lifestyle has been trust in the solidity of the news based on the history with such people as Edward R. Murrow and later Walter Cronkite, etc.
Will you seriously sit Walter Cronkite and Bill O'Reilly at the same table?
Really?
The news people weren't simple savages in the model many of us know but now that's changed and the consequence is a ball of confusion. The hell of it is the confusion never changed.
Ed: so the journos in the 60s weren't worth a shit either!
That's most likely an unfair charge since there's no way to deliver truth if you're not given it. The truth of the Gulf of Tonkin hoax wasn't known until well after it happened and escalation of American presence in Vietnam was the result. It was just one more example in a long stream of CIA abominations in manipulated news (i.e. Gulf of Tonkin).
The commonality to all of that is we didn't hear of any of it until long after it happened. The same thing happens now and, what do you know, people don't believe what they're told in this time either. The history gives them no reason they should.
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