Trust Issues
Recently, the Pew Research Center published a report attesting to a deeply polarized news landscape, in which trust falls along ideological lines. Democrats are significantly more likely to trust major news organizations—ABC, CBS, and NBC among them—which Republicans tend to view as liberal media machines. A majority of Republicans trust Fox News, which Democrats overwhelmingly see as GOP propaganda. Around the same time, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found, in its annual digital news report, that “traditional US news media increasingly risks being eclipsed by online personalities and creators.” These include the usual suspects of the right-wing podcast and YouTube sphere—such as Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, and former Fox-er Tucker Carlson—as well as characters from the left: Brian Tyler Cohen and David Pakman. “Some of the most popular personalities over-index with young men, with right-leaning audiences, and with those that have low levels of trust in mainstream media outlets,” Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute, wrote, “seeing them as biased or part of a liberal elite.”
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