This was a really interesting podcast, and it made me more positive that the mainstream media has no clue how much they are actually hated and despised. And these two guests pretending to masquerade as centrist reasonable media skeptics speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
This whole thing felt like a murderers brother on the witness stand blaming the weather, an influx of people wearing cargo shorts in culture, and irritating tonal inflections of the victim for the murder committed. And really their brother was just caught naturally responding to the conditions at play. And looking the victims family in the eye and saying when in history did murder not happen. With an added weird tone of condescension like these are obviously the appropriate culprits.
Really you can tell who they are attributing “agency” to which really shows their bias. The mainstream media had no “agency” and other forces did. Obviously lots of forces were at play, but I recommend that these two really take a hard look at how they attribute agency relative to themselves, the profession, and others.
Elitists arise from an interesting tension between the agency they attribute to themselves vs others, and how much they try to exert their world view, vs the accountability they have for its flaws.
To speak to the dismissals of the Latin X and other cultural trends hammered down our throats 3 years ago and then toned down recently. They forget that our HR departments and cultural institutions lag a few years behind the “coastal elite news” and just now our smug hr class is using the articles you all wrote in 2020-22 to say “this is established truth” now. And it’s great that y’all have moved on, but it’s kind of like you guys are the mouth chewing up all of this news turning it into “narrative” commenting on it’s complex “mouth-feel” and how interesting it all is, but the rest of us are all the anus dealing with the repercussions of you eating crispy creams for the last 4 years.
But don’t worry you just ate an apple… so we all good.
I suppose your first total garbage episode was inevitable. And here it is.
These guests are worthless with no insight into the topic. They excuse themselves of all their many sins. They are totally blind to the havoc they wrought by allowing the total ideological capture of their news rooms.
It's no surprise. Ben Smith is personally responsible for much of my own lack of trust in the. He's among the worst and most dishonest of all the bad faith reporters out there.
~10:30 Dude says "it's ObViOuSlY the latter" with respect to the media shakeup of the internet and technology as the reason people don't trust the media anymore, which is just proof that it's impossible to overdose on copium. Those changes have been around for longer than a decade, so why then is the rapid evaporation of mainstream news trust happening NOW?
~22:30 Lady says "we're fighting yesterday's war" with regard to the latinx and the strategy of turning vocabulary into a minefield as a means to win the moral highground. Which just comes off as a pathetic attempt to steer the conversation away from ever accepting responsibility.
~25:03 Dude says show me a chart that has an inflection point of latinx showing up that aligns exactly with the measured drop in trust of the mainstream media. Hypothetically, even if latinx was the one, and only culprit, its inflection point wouldn't align exactly. That is a willfully stupid thing to have said out loud; in service of not taking responsibility.
~43.23 Dude says more or less: The best journalism is when you get to tell people what the truth is. The problem with that is that journalists are just people. So to say that the best journalism is when the journalist has decided what's true and not be forthcoming about the process of how they arrived there, is incredibly arrogant.
I'm relieved that some of the comments here are so thoughtful, articulate, and also sniffed out the same BS. Particularly @EL and @Fuzzybair.
Do you feel this way about all the Fox News people who aggressively supported the Iraq War and have never admitted they were wrong? Tucker Carlson was a passionate cheerleader for it.
Yes. When that was happening I was probably annoyingly vociferous about it.
What was the point of your question? Because I don't want to jump to conclusions, but it reads to me as a what-about-ism rhetorical device to challenge my ethos, and that you weren't actually interested in hearing the answer.
The point is that the people I most often see complaining about “the media” often believe the most ridiculous things, and furthermore don’t hold people in their tribe accountable. Sean Davis and Jack Posobiec have millions of followers despite constantly “reporting” things that are proven wrong over and over.
I came to comment about what a miss this episode was but everyone else beat me to it, and eloquently so. Nothing much to add, except perhaps if you want to know why people don't trust the media, ask those who consume it, rather than those who produce it.
These two guests are really the ideal media representatives to have on this episode because their responses so perfectly highlight the way the media never genuinely owns up to their role in why the public doesn't trust them. It was just one excuse after another; deflections, distractions, blaming it on technology, media trends, power shifts, social media, billionaires, covid, "it's always been this way", blah blah. They bear no responsibility whatsoever in how we got here.
No admission of how they deliberately distort the truth (eg Covington Catholic, Jacob Blake), how they strongly emphasize stories that fit certain narratives and bury (or whitewash) ones that don't (Hunter Biden laptop), how they are constantly trying to foist on the public certain trendy ideologies (remember when CNN informed us that "there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth"?), how they will describe the same action in two different ways depending on which team (or ethnicity) the story is about (eg https://x.com/DanFriedman81/status/1720526774088442109), how they will always bring up the race/ethnicity of a person when it favors a certain narrative, but will obscure that detail when it doesn't, how even their vaunted "fact-checking" is so prone to bias, how they will shamelessly gaslight the public (eg "You're crazy if you think Biden is senile!", or that infamous CNN chyron assuring us all there were "mostly peaceful protests" while we could all see a city burning in the background), how they are so quick to blame everything on racism/sexism/bigotry instead of taking a more nuanced and multivariable approach, how they breathlessly fearmonger over things that barely happen, but choose to downplay trends that are actually quite widespread (eg anti-black vs anti-Jewish hate crimes), how they will slavishly tout the questionable claims of activist groups, how they will distort findings from scientific studies in order to promote their desired narrative, how they will portray mass murderers in a positive light (eg WaPo headline describing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "an austere religious scholar"), how they will advance libelous claims that flatter their biases even when the claims have been disproven (eg buried bodies of indigenous kids at Canadian schools), how they will conduct utterly unfair hitjobs on disfavored figures and orgs, how they will dishonestly frame innocuous actions as nefarious (eg framing Trump's MSG rally as akin to the 1939 Nazi rally), and so much more.
Kudos to Andy for trying to bring the real issues to the fore.
(Jesse Singal has covered many instances of the above transgressions in his Substack and podcast. The list is endless.)
I very much enjoy Reflector. Reading through the comments posted here, it is clear that others have listened to this episode and felt it was a miss. I do not think so. I think there is a kernel of something interesting hidden at around 49:00. Nayeema Raza brings up the demand side of the media. She mentions Rogan, she mentions the need for individuals to "read the whole thing" below the headline or graph.
What I think Journalists & Media in general does not understand, still to this day, is the opportunity cost of the ecosystem to the average individual. If the median household income in the United States is $80,000, and the average household size is 3.22 persons. That means that roughly half of the population has a household income below that amount. Which is not great for selling subscriptions to everything under the sun.
The digitization and individualization of the subscription model actually has a downside-it limits access. When individuals in media complain about people not reading below the title, all I can think of is back to the time when if someone really wanted to share something, they could pass the printed paper on to someone else-without paying an additional fee for sharing. The media has acknowledged how fundamentally their model has had to change as a result of the internet, but they have yet to recognize how their services may not be as essential as other things in our lives.
It is not about only trust. It is about access and necessity. Joe Rogan's podcast is successful, it is also not pay-walled. Anyone can listen to these 3-hour long conversations. Many people in America do not have the means to subscribe to 10 or 15 different services at once. As someone in their 40s I know that my friends do not subscribe to the Times, WaPo, or really any news service. They have kids. It is more important to subscribe to the things like Art Classes, Ballet Lessons, Tai Kwon Do, and other activities than it is to a newspaper, Substack, or podcast.
Many might say, but it is just the price of a coffee, to which I would share an anecdote from a friend of mine who is a fellow teacher who shared the following sentiment a week ago: "I am addicted to Starbucks. I go 1-2 times a week. I work in a Middle School, it's hard. I pass by the Starbucks on the way to work, and if I know it is going to be a bad day it's my incentive to keep showing up." So, for everyone saying "A subscription is the price of 1 coffee per month"... it's not about the coffee. It's about the challenge of the jobs people have and the lives they lead.
Over the past 30 years journalism evolved to become diaries for the well-educated. This is where the media lost peoples trust by engaging in journalism rather than reporting. Reporting is where you give an account of what is observed or investigated. Podcasts are more similar to reporting than journalism-they ask a question, which is heard, and subjects/participants (by and large) provide an unedited answer.
To go back to the anecdote above, most people just want to get on with their lives. They want information delivered in a way that is without fluff, without bias, without color commentary.
I have to admit, I am the same. I prefer the short Q&A. In fact, I can say with certainty that if I was not in the middle of a break from the K12 classroom, I would not be here writing this post. I would not be listening to podcasts, reading print, or any other things because I would be too busy. I also would not pay for something I do not have the time to utilize fully. That's why the coffee-for a subscription model fails. I get to drink my coffee. I do not have to stop doing other things to do that. It can be part of my multi-tasking and my nutrient consumption for the day. It serves multiple purposes and is a type of consumption that does not diminish my time to do, think about, work on other things.
I have shared this podcast with almost a dozen people, because I really enjoy it. But maybe 1 of the folks I have shared it with has actually listened to part of an episode. This is because it's not news, it's Journalism. It's not about trust, its about time. Since the pandemic most of us "normies" would much rather spend time with the people in our lives. The ones we could not see or talk to, the choice is now to share a cup of coffee with a friend or sit alone and read an article. For that reason, even though what the media says might be relevant to our lives and questions we have, its just not that important when we all have so many other things going on that we want to, or are required to, plug in to.
A perfect example of why no one trusts the media occurs at the 50:15 mark. "Journalist" Ben says an opposite example from the Russiagate hoax reporting was that the media got "bullied" out of "reporting how hard Russia worked to get [Trump] elected by hacking the DNC."
This guy never investigated any of that, obviously.
Does he know that Assange publicly stated he got nothing from Russia?
Does he know that Bill Binney and many former Intel officials proved that an external hack of DNC servers was technically impossible at the speeds data was transferred?
Has he read any of Crowdstrike's ludicrous testimony on why they claimed Russia was involved? How about the utter nonsense in the Intel "assessment" that Brennan tasked Peter Strzok to write? Ever heard of "Fancy Bear"?
Has he done any looking into Seth Rich? How about the five Pakistani IT techs for the DNC, who fled after the "hack."
Nope. He just casually asserts Russia hacked the DNC to get Trump elected.
This is why no one trusts the media: You can't see your obvious bias.
It used to be that reporting, opinion, and entertainment were kept separate. Now, they have all merged together, or at least it is widely perceived that the reporting has been heavily driven by opinion.
For journalism, my expectation was always that journalists reported facts, and then narratives were either explicitly drawn from the facts or the audience was allowed to construct their own narratives based on the facts. Now, it feels to the public that the narrative is predetermined (based on the journalists political commitments), and facts are selectively reported to fit the narrative.
All I could think of leaving this episode Is how'd I'd love to hear a classic reflector-sode looking at different points of time where the trust in media was either really high, or really low. You guys mentioned the Yellow Journalism era, which sounds really interesting.
I also feel like the conversation around media legitimacy is happening everywhere and in different formats, so it would be great to hear something that is thought provoking in a different way.
Looking forward to this, (and there are obviously many reasons behind the lack of trust), but having Ben Smith on to talk about "Why Doesn't Anyone Trust The Media?" does feel a little like doing an episode about femicide in 19th century London with guest host Jack the Ripper
Are the commenters who are mad because the guests don’t apologize for LatinX also mad that Elon boosts absurd conspiracy theories, like that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay lover?
Are they mad that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham never apologized for their aggressive jingoism for the Iraq War?
Are they mad that Tucker Carlson said in texts after the 2020 election that Trump is a demonic force?
Does it bother them that Fox is the most trusted by their audience despite all this documented lying?
I never trusted Fox News, I still don't trust Fox, and I expect to never trust Fox.
Over 2 decades Fox has been an explicitly conservative outlet. They say "Fair and Balanced" but we've known that's a joke for a while.
The distinction is that Literally ever other Corporate Press has joined them in partizan hackery while pretending to be objective, and are now surprised when everyone starts calling them partizan hacks.
I like your podcast, and I loved The Witch Trial, but this episode was not good. Please do not have these two guests on again. They were defensive, unpersuasive, boring, and unwilling to accept the reality we live in.
Thanks for being a listener Ted. Do you think there's value in knowing what people inside the mainstream media make of the loss of trust in the mainstream media, even if what gets revealed in such an interrogation may not quell your concerns? A big part of what we've been up to, especially since the Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast, is trying to get people involved in some of the biggest debates in society to share their views - whether we agree with those views or not.
I agree with the sentiment expressed by one of your commenter's above: There's not much value in us hearing what the mainstream media thinks is wrong with the media. We hear that all the time.
What the mainstream media should value is learning what its listeners (or former listeners/readers) think is wrong with the media. Judging by their actions, they're either not listening or don't care.
Thank you Andy. I think it is interesting to learn what people in mainstream media think about the loss of trust in media. Unfortunately your guests on this episode were unable to share their point of view without being condescending and dismissive. I enjoy learning what people with different perspectives think. I profoundly disagree with the professor you had on to discuss Palestinian issues, but I found her to be engaging and thoughtful. These guests were neither.
Your comments line up with much of the feedback we've been getting via email as well. It appears that many felt the guests where dismissive of some of the core concerns the public has with journalism. As you can hear in my own comments in the episode, I'm very worried that the media is missing the opportunity to make serious changes to secure the important role they play in a self-governed society.
Reagan ended “ The Fairness Doctrine” ( a strict Law regulated by The FCC. This “ birthed talk radio, and allowed corporations to have multi frequencies , stations to broadcast ( spoonfeed bullshit to the masses
Yes. Unfortunately, most people have no concept of a reputable source. An article in the Epoch Times carries the same weight as an article in the New York Times. It’s all part of the same undifferentiated media mass.
Man these two guests media people need to take a sabbatical and go do any job where they're actually held accountable.
The constant deflecting the inability to just say "Yeah we messed up on latinx, this is why, and here's how we can fix it next time"
But no just "Industry trends 🤷"
Stay dying Media.
With questions like these, who cares about answers.
https://youtu.be/cAZEg-PKyeM
This was a really interesting podcast, and it made me more positive that the mainstream media has no clue how much they are actually hated and despised. And these two guests pretending to masquerade as centrist reasonable media skeptics speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
This whole thing felt like a murderers brother on the witness stand blaming the weather, an influx of people wearing cargo shorts in culture, and irritating tonal inflections of the victim for the murder committed. And really their brother was just caught naturally responding to the conditions at play. And looking the victims family in the eye and saying when in history did murder not happen. With an added weird tone of condescension like these are obviously the appropriate culprits.
Really you can tell who they are attributing “agency” to which really shows their bias. The mainstream media had no “agency” and other forces did. Obviously lots of forces were at play, but I recommend that these two really take a hard look at how they attribute agency relative to themselves, the profession, and others.
Elitists arise from an interesting tension between the agency they attribute to themselves vs others, and how much they try to exert their world view, vs the accountability they have for its flaws.
To speak to the dismissals of the Latin X and other cultural trends hammered down our throats 3 years ago and then toned down recently. They forget that our HR departments and cultural institutions lag a few years behind the “coastal elite news” and just now our smug hr class is using the articles you all wrote in 2020-22 to say “this is established truth” now. And it’s great that y’all have moved on, but it’s kind of like you guys are the mouth chewing up all of this news turning it into “narrative” commenting on it’s complex “mouth-feel” and how interesting it all is, but the rest of us are all the anus dealing with the repercussions of you eating crispy creams for the last 4 years.
But don’t worry you just ate an apple… so we all good.
I suppose your first total garbage episode was inevitable. And here it is.
These guests are worthless with no insight into the topic. They excuse themselves of all their many sins. They are totally blind to the havoc they wrought by allowing the total ideological capture of their news rooms.
It's no surprise. Ben Smith is personally responsible for much of my own lack of trust in the. He's among the worst and most dishonest of all the bad faith reporters out there.
Do better.
For me this episode was encouraging to see that the legacy media types will remain firmly in the past as the rest of us move on without them.
It's an art to get people to so clearly display who they truly are.
A few things:
~10:30 Dude says "it's ObViOuSlY the latter" with respect to the media shakeup of the internet and technology as the reason people don't trust the media anymore, which is just proof that it's impossible to overdose on copium. Those changes have been around for longer than a decade, so why then is the rapid evaporation of mainstream news trust happening NOW?
~22:30 Lady says "we're fighting yesterday's war" with regard to the latinx and the strategy of turning vocabulary into a minefield as a means to win the moral highground. Which just comes off as a pathetic attempt to steer the conversation away from ever accepting responsibility.
~25:03 Dude says show me a chart that has an inflection point of latinx showing up that aligns exactly with the measured drop in trust of the mainstream media. Hypothetically, even if latinx was the one, and only culprit, its inflection point wouldn't align exactly. That is a willfully stupid thing to have said out loud; in service of not taking responsibility.
~43.23 Dude says more or less: The best journalism is when you get to tell people what the truth is. The problem with that is that journalists are just people. So to say that the best journalism is when the journalist has decided what's true and not be forthcoming about the process of how they arrived there, is incredibly arrogant.
I'm relieved that some of the comments here are so thoughtful, articulate, and also sniffed out the same BS. Particularly @EL and @Fuzzybair.
Do you feel this way about all the Fox News people who aggressively supported the Iraq War and have never admitted they were wrong? Tucker Carlson was a passionate cheerleader for it.
Yes. When that was happening I was probably annoyingly vociferous about it.
What was the point of your question? Because I don't want to jump to conclusions, but it reads to me as a what-about-ism rhetorical device to challenge my ethos, and that you weren't actually interested in hearing the answer.
The point is that the people I most often see complaining about “the media” often believe the most ridiculous things, and furthermore don’t hold people in their tribe accountable. Sean Davis and Jack Posobiec have millions of followers despite constantly “reporting” things that are proven wrong over and over.
I came to comment about what a miss this episode was but everyone else beat me to it, and eloquently so. Nothing much to add, except perhaps if you want to know why people don't trust the media, ask those who consume it, rather than those who produce it.
> if you want to know why people don't trust the media, ask those who consume it, rather than those who produce it.
This is such a brilliant insight, yet blindingly obvious once you hear it stated.
These two guests are really the ideal media representatives to have on this episode because their responses so perfectly highlight the way the media never genuinely owns up to their role in why the public doesn't trust them. It was just one excuse after another; deflections, distractions, blaming it on technology, media trends, power shifts, social media, billionaires, covid, "it's always been this way", blah blah. They bear no responsibility whatsoever in how we got here.
No admission of how they deliberately distort the truth (eg Covington Catholic, Jacob Blake), how they strongly emphasize stories that fit certain narratives and bury (or whitewash) ones that don't (Hunter Biden laptop), how they are constantly trying to foist on the public certain trendy ideologies (remember when CNN informed us that "there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth"?), how they will describe the same action in two different ways depending on which team (or ethnicity) the story is about (eg https://x.com/DanFriedman81/status/1720526774088442109), how they will always bring up the race/ethnicity of a person when it favors a certain narrative, but will obscure that detail when it doesn't, how even their vaunted "fact-checking" is so prone to bias, how they will shamelessly gaslight the public (eg "You're crazy if you think Biden is senile!", or that infamous CNN chyron assuring us all there were "mostly peaceful protests" while we could all see a city burning in the background), how they are so quick to blame everything on racism/sexism/bigotry instead of taking a more nuanced and multivariable approach, how they breathlessly fearmonger over things that barely happen, but choose to downplay trends that are actually quite widespread (eg anti-black vs anti-Jewish hate crimes), how they will slavishly tout the questionable claims of activist groups, how they will distort findings from scientific studies in order to promote their desired narrative, how they will portray mass murderers in a positive light (eg WaPo headline describing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "an austere religious scholar"), how they will advance libelous claims that flatter their biases even when the claims have been disproven (eg buried bodies of indigenous kids at Canadian schools), how they will conduct utterly unfair hitjobs on disfavored figures and orgs, how they will dishonestly frame innocuous actions as nefarious (eg framing Trump's MSG rally as akin to the 1939 Nazi rally), and so much more.
Kudos to Andy for trying to bring the real issues to the fore.
(Jesse Singal has covered many instances of the above transgressions in his Substack and podcast. The list is endless.)
I very much enjoy Reflector. Reading through the comments posted here, it is clear that others have listened to this episode and felt it was a miss. I do not think so. I think there is a kernel of something interesting hidden at around 49:00. Nayeema Raza brings up the demand side of the media. She mentions Rogan, she mentions the need for individuals to "read the whole thing" below the headline or graph.
What I think Journalists & Media in general does not understand, still to this day, is the opportunity cost of the ecosystem to the average individual. If the median household income in the United States is $80,000, and the average household size is 3.22 persons. That means that roughly half of the population has a household income below that amount. Which is not great for selling subscriptions to everything under the sun.
The digitization and individualization of the subscription model actually has a downside-it limits access. When individuals in media complain about people not reading below the title, all I can think of is back to the time when if someone really wanted to share something, they could pass the printed paper on to someone else-without paying an additional fee for sharing. The media has acknowledged how fundamentally their model has had to change as a result of the internet, but they have yet to recognize how their services may not be as essential as other things in our lives.
It is not about only trust. It is about access and necessity. Joe Rogan's podcast is successful, it is also not pay-walled. Anyone can listen to these 3-hour long conversations. Many people in America do not have the means to subscribe to 10 or 15 different services at once. As someone in their 40s I know that my friends do not subscribe to the Times, WaPo, or really any news service. They have kids. It is more important to subscribe to the things like Art Classes, Ballet Lessons, Tai Kwon Do, and other activities than it is to a newspaper, Substack, or podcast.
Many might say, but it is just the price of a coffee, to which I would share an anecdote from a friend of mine who is a fellow teacher who shared the following sentiment a week ago: "I am addicted to Starbucks. I go 1-2 times a week. I work in a Middle School, it's hard. I pass by the Starbucks on the way to work, and if I know it is going to be a bad day it's my incentive to keep showing up." So, for everyone saying "A subscription is the price of 1 coffee per month"... it's not about the coffee. It's about the challenge of the jobs people have and the lives they lead.
Over the past 30 years journalism evolved to become diaries for the well-educated. This is where the media lost peoples trust by engaging in journalism rather than reporting. Reporting is where you give an account of what is observed or investigated. Podcasts are more similar to reporting than journalism-they ask a question, which is heard, and subjects/participants (by and large) provide an unedited answer.
To go back to the anecdote above, most people just want to get on with their lives. They want information delivered in a way that is without fluff, without bias, without color commentary.
I have to admit, I am the same. I prefer the short Q&A. In fact, I can say with certainty that if I was not in the middle of a break from the K12 classroom, I would not be here writing this post. I would not be listening to podcasts, reading print, or any other things because I would be too busy. I also would not pay for something I do not have the time to utilize fully. That's why the coffee-for a subscription model fails. I get to drink my coffee. I do not have to stop doing other things to do that. It can be part of my multi-tasking and my nutrient consumption for the day. It serves multiple purposes and is a type of consumption that does not diminish my time to do, think about, work on other things.
I have shared this podcast with almost a dozen people, because I really enjoy it. But maybe 1 of the folks I have shared it with has actually listened to part of an episode. This is because it's not news, it's Journalism. It's not about trust, its about time. Since the pandemic most of us "normies" would much rather spend time with the people in our lives. The ones we could not see or talk to, the choice is now to share a cup of coffee with a friend or sit alone and read an article. For that reason, even though what the media says might be relevant to our lives and questions we have, its just not that important when we all have so many other things going on that we want to, or are required to, plug in to.
A perfect example of why no one trusts the media occurs at the 50:15 mark. "Journalist" Ben says an opposite example from the Russiagate hoax reporting was that the media got "bullied" out of "reporting how hard Russia worked to get [Trump] elected by hacking the DNC."
This guy never investigated any of that, obviously.
Does he know that Assange publicly stated he got nothing from Russia?
Does he know that Bill Binney and many former Intel officials proved that an external hack of DNC servers was technically impossible at the speeds data was transferred?
Has he read any of Crowdstrike's ludicrous testimony on why they claimed Russia was involved? How about the utter nonsense in the Intel "assessment" that Brennan tasked Peter Strzok to write? Ever heard of "Fancy Bear"?
Has he done any looking into Seth Rich? How about the five Pakistani IT techs for the DNC, who fled after the "hack."
Nope. He just casually asserts Russia hacked the DNC to get Trump elected.
This is why no one trusts the media: You can't see your obvious bias.
It used to be that reporting, opinion, and entertainment were kept separate. Now, they have all merged together, or at least it is widely perceived that the reporting has been heavily driven by opinion.
For journalism, my expectation was always that journalists reported facts, and then narratives were either explicitly drawn from the facts or the audience was allowed to construct their own narratives based on the facts. Now, it feels to the public that the narrative is predetermined (based on the journalists political commitments), and facts are selectively reported to fit the narrative.
All I could think of leaving this episode Is how'd I'd love to hear a classic reflector-sode looking at different points of time where the trust in media was either really high, or really low. You guys mentioned the Yellow Journalism era, which sounds really interesting.
I also feel like the conversation around media legitimacy is happening everywhere and in different formats, so it would be great to hear something that is thought provoking in a different way.
Looking forward to this, (and there are obviously many reasons behind the lack of trust), but having Ben Smith on to talk about "Why Doesn't Anyone Trust The Media?" does feel a little like doing an episode about femicide in 19th century London with guest host Jack the Ripper
Are the commenters who are mad because the guests don’t apologize for LatinX also mad that Elon boosts absurd conspiracy theories, like that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay lover?
Are they mad that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham never apologized for their aggressive jingoism for the Iraq War?
Are they mad that Tucker Carlson said in texts after the 2020 election that Trump is a demonic force?
Does it bother them that Fox is the most trusted by their audience despite all this documented lying?
I never trusted Fox News, I still don't trust Fox, and I expect to never trust Fox.
Over 2 decades Fox has been an explicitly conservative outlet. They say "Fair and Balanced" but we've known that's a joke for a while.
The distinction is that Literally ever other Corporate Press has joined them in partizan hackery while pretending to be objective, and are now surprised when everyone starts calling them partizan hacks.
Okay. How about Elon Musk?
I don't trust him.
But the people who have contempt for me, hate him.
The News freak out when he bought twitter was delicious.
I dislike cops because they can kill me and get away with it,
I dislike journalists more because they can kill my reputation and get away with it.
I like your podcast, and I loved The Witch Trial, but this episode was not good. Please do not have these two guests on again. They were defensive, unpersuasive, boring, and unwilling to accept the reality we live in.
Thanks for being a listener Ted. Do you think there's value in knowing what people inside the mainstream media make of the loss of trust in the mainstream media, even if what gets revealed in such an interrogation may not quell your concerns? A big part of what we've been up to, especially since the Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast, is trying to get people involved in some of the biggest debates in society to share their views - whether we agree with those views or not.
I agree with the sentiment expressed by one of your commenter's above: There's not much value in us hearing what the mainstream media thinks is wrong with the media. We hear that all the time.
What the mainstream media should value is learning what its listeners (or former listeners/readers) think is wrong with the media. Judging by their actions, they're either not listening or don't care.
Thank you Andy. I think it is interesting to learn what people in mainstream media think about the loss of trust in media. Unfortunately your guests on this episode were unable to share their point of view without being condescending and dismissive. I enjoy learning what people with different perspectives think. I profoundly disagree with the professor you had on to discuss Palestinian issues, but I found her to be engaging and thoughtful. These guests were neither.
Your comments line up with much of the feedback we've been getting via email as well. It appears that many felt the guests where dismissive of some of the core concerns the public has with journalism. As you can hear in my own comments in the episode, I'm very worried that the media is missing the opportunity to make serious changes to secure the important role they play in a self-governed society.
Reagan ended “ The Fairness Doctrine” ( a strict Law regulated by The FCC. This “ birthed talk radio, and allowed corporations to have multi frequencies , stations to broadcast ( spoonfeed bullshit to the masses
I trust News Broadcasts on reputable networks. Not FOX, Not ABC Radio !
Yes. Unfortunately, most people have no concept of a reputable source. An article in the Epoch Times carries the same weight as an article in the New York Times. It’s all part of the same undifferentiated media mass.