Half of Americans think the news media intends to mislead them, survey says

Perhaps they don’t see it as “misleading” but I 100% believe all news media has a bias and attempts to influence the thoughts and opinions of viewers to some degree.

Some individuals who identify as journalists do a better job of accounting for this than others and of course some deliberately obfuscate and lie.

But all/any news can be misleading.

Even if it’s technically the truth.

After all, a lie can be propped up by a hundred truths.

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I don’t disagree with you at all here - although atm there is no “main” media outlet handling trans issues remotely coherently probably anywhere in the world at the moment, so the Beeb likely isn’t an outlier on this front. I am not, repeat not, saying that this is a good thing. It obviously isn’t.
The contention was that the BBC and ITN are “better than most”, which is almost certainly true, albeit also an enormous condemnation of the actual state of things given their own manifest inadequacies.

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Well, they aren’t openly calling for the elimination of trans people, so they aren’t Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines

Yet.

I don’t think it is much of an exaggeration that no trans person in the UK trusts the BBC anymore. We avoid talking to their journalists, even if they personally are supportive, because the editors will butcher any interview we give to give TERs a sympathetic view.

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Although not about most of the things they’re being misled about… The Republican strategy of having policy that directly goes against the interests of their own voters only works because right-wing media draws people in with the lies they want to hear and follow it up with all the misinformation that keeps that strategy viable.

Fox used to have that distinction - they had their commentary where they made things up, and the news stories, where information might be accurate but incomplete. That’s not been true for a while. I recollect watching Fox after 9/11, to see what they were saying, and they would do news reports on the run-up to the war on Iraq by framing it as “The War on Terror” (that text being on screen every time they talked about Iraq). What did it have to do with terrorism? Nothing - not even the Bush administration was daring to claim that, but Fox really wanted to sell that war. Their news reports at the time regularly presented already debunked assertions as well. Things have only gotten worse since, and post-Trump they broke with reality pretty consistently.

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Well, as long as Fox News is considered news media, they’d be right.

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Changing the question to “all news media” would lead to a drastically different answer.

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There’s a huge number of journalists who participate in two activities.

  1. Presenting both sides of topics that don’t have both sides. Particularly presenting two sides as equals when they are clearly not equal.
  2. Repeating direct quotes without providing any context. Especially when the quote is a lie or misleading.

Both of those have the effect of propping up the lie and making it sound equivalent to the truth.

Like other polls in this theme, I suspect the “half” is not a single block, but made of different people each thinking of different organizations as misleading them.

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Well, there are stories:

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Only half?!

On the right we have Faux et al which clearly mislead viewers. And the trumpers think everybody else is trying to mislead them. Thus why isn’t it about 100% that think the news media is trying to mislead them?

Besides that, we have a general pattern of news media trying to make things seem more important than they are–which is a form of misleading. Even with no political bias in the picture the competition for eyeballs will cause a distortion of the news. Everybody is trying to get an angle–never mind if it’s actually true. Speed and sensationalism take priority over accuracy.

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I mean they even argued in a legal filing that no one should take them seriously, so …

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This!

With all polls, extreme skepticism of the methodology should be our first (and often only) stance. The way they asked the question, to how many people, and the way they chose the audience is everything. You can get any result you want by tweaking those three things, intentionally or not. Surveys are essentially useless for this reason. The controls are far too weak and the error bars swamp the data.

I wouldn’t put any stock in results like this at all. We know the current state of media has some issues and we should work on them, but a poll like this is worthless.

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Course local media is owned by large conglomerates that tend to put out one or two local news sources only, so good to see that Joe and Jane public are still misinformed and have a sense of self importance.

The cable outlets are basically party propaganda

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