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Trust in US media drops near record low with only 36%
of Americans expressing confidence in reporting
7 Oct, 2021 18:38
A new Gallup poll shows that Americans’ trust in mass media outlets has tumbled to the second-lowest level on record, and the relatively few US adults who think they’re seeing truth in news reports are predominantly Democrats.
Just 36% of American adults expressed some level of trust in mass media in a survey done last month, down from 40% last year and historic highs around 70% in the 1970s, Gallup said on Thursday. In fact, only 7% of respondents said they have “a great deal” of trust in newspaper, television and radio news reporting, while 29% have “a fair amount” of trust.
The all-time low of 32% was set in 2016, when Donald Trump blasted the political press as “slime” and “lying, disgusting people” on his way to defeating Hillary Clinton in that year’s contentious presidential election.
Trump’s presidency and his disputed election loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 appears to have widened the political divide in media perceptions. While 68% of Democrats polled by Gallup said they trust the media, just 31% of Independents and 11% of Republicans still believe in the Fourth Estate.
The media-trust gap between Democrats and Republicans has widened from 23 percentage points in 2015, at 55-32, to 57 points in 2021, Gallup’s polling shows. At the start of the century, that gap was just six points, at 53-47.
This, of course, reveals how far left MSM has gone.
Democrat voters perhaps liked what they saw from the media’s treatment of Trump during his presidency and its coverage of the 2020 election, as their trust level shot up to as high as 76% in 2018 from 51% in 2016. It has remained around 70% for the past five years.
For example, mainstream outlets joined Big Tech in suppressing October 2020 reports on the Biden family’s overseas influence-peddling. Revelations from a laptop that Biden’s son, Hunter, allegedly left at a Delaware repair shop were portrayed as ‘Russian disinformation’. Nearly a year later, with the Democrat safely installed as president, a reporter from one of the outlets that promoted the Russian-disinformation theory, Politico, revealed that he had independently confirmed several of the most damaging emails from the laptop.
And when a January 6 protest over claims of election fraud at the US Capitol escalated into a riot, CNN and other mainstream outlets joined Democrat politicians in touting the event as a deadly and racially motivated “insurrection.” The only person killed during the riot was a Trump supporter who was shot by police, while four others, including one officer, died of natural causes.
While coverage of the Trump era apparently pleased Democrats and alienated many Republicans, Independents are taking an increasingly skeptical view of the media. Trust in the media among Independents has dropped from 42% in 2018 to 31% in 2021, Gallup’s figures showed.
Coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic also may have diminished public trust in the media. A hidden-camera investigation by Project Veritas in April purported to show CNN technical director Charlie Chester saying that the network hyped fears of the virus to boost ratings.
“Covid? Gangbusters with ratings, right? Which is why we constantly have the death toll on the side,” Chester was shown saying in the Project Veritas video.
Gallup’s findings are in line with those of the Pew Research Center, which said in August that Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to say they had at least some trust in information from national news organizations. That gap went from 13 percentage points in 2016, at 83-70, to 43 points this year, at 78-35.
Reaction to Gallup’s latest poll was similarly divided. Greg Scott, a staffer for the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, said the results showed that it’s a “good time for some introspection, journos.”
At the other end of the spectrum, a left-wing Twitter user interpreted the poll as a reflection of Democrats rejecting “Trump- and GOP-enabling lies” and Republicans distrusting the media “every time the press tells the truth.”
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Washington Post's ‘conspiracy theory’ quiz declares existence of
‘deep state’ fake news, contradicting its own reporting
8 Oct, 2021 15:49
If you believe in a “Deep State” embedded in the US government, then you’re falling down the conspiracy “rabbit hole,” the Washington Post claims. Yet the Post believes this theory too. It just doesn’t call it a ‘Deep State’.
Nine in 10 Americans believe at least one conspiracy theory, researchers found earlier this summer. Yet conspiracy theories run the gamut from ‘Bigfoot exists’ to ‘the Holocaust never happened’, and the Washington Post published a quiz this week to remind its readers which ones to believe and which to discard. The answers tell a story in themselves.
In a series of multiple-choice questions, the statement “There is a ‘deep state’ embedded in the government that operates in secret and without oversight” is marked as false.
“For much of the past four years, Republicans have speculated that a ‘deep state’ was working to undermine President Donald Trump,” the Post explained, adding: “While the FBI and CIA do conduct covert operations, there’s little evidence for a separate Deep State.”
Yet this is untrue, according to the Washington Post’s own reporting. The Post revealed in 2013 that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains a “black budget” of $52.6 billion mapping “a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny,” which spends these funds on spy operations and occasionally lethal action abroad. The public didn’t know that the NSA spied on Americans’ communications for a long time, until the Post published Edward Snowden’s leaks that same year, and the Post was instrumental in drawing attention to the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.
Even before Snowden’s revelations, the Post in 2010 described the US national security and intelligence apparatus as “a hidden world, growing beyond control.” This leviathan, the paper described, is “hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight,” while “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first reported Snowden’s leaks, described the Post’s about-turn on the existence of the Deep State as an example of “how the Trump era corrupted almost every mainstream institution in the US, especially media corporations.”
The CIA’s experiments with mind-control and psychological torture, which were carried out on Americans during multiple presidential administrations, are not the stuff of conspiracy theory. These experiments took place between 1953 and 1973, with some information on the program, known as MKUltra, only declassified in 2001. Another question in the Washington Post’s quiz even highlights this CIA program as an example of a conspiracy that actually took place.
The term ‘Deep State’ has been used in recent years to describe the bureaucrats and intelligence agency operatives who worked to frustrate and stymie former President Donald Trump’s agenda. When invoked by Republicans and Trump supporters, the term is ridiculed as a conspiracy theory, but those involved openly admit to working against the former president from behind the scenes.
General Mark Milley, commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went behind Trump’s back to assure his Chinese counterpart that he and the national security establishment wouldn’t let Trump do anything “rogue” after his election loss last year. Milley admitted to consorting with Beijing, and with Democrat politicians, in a recent book by Washington Post reporters Robert Costa and Bob Woodward.
Time Magazine lionized the “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to ensure that Trump lost his re-election bid. In the words of the magazine, “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
New Yorker author David Rohde, who has written a book on the Deep State and the conspiracies surrounding it, told Vox last year that the Deep State exists, and can be described as “a permanent government or an institutional government” made up of “incredibly large and powerful organizations like the FBI and the CIA and the NSA.” Whether by the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation – which was predicated on several lies – or unnamed ‘intelligence sources’ planting false stories in the media to hamper Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, this “permanent government” did work against Trump before and during his four years in office.
Curiously, the Washington Post’s quiz now describes the claim that “Donald Trump colluded with Russians to steal the presidency in 2016” as false, after four years of articles pushing the notion that there was, in fact, “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact, it seems, largely depends on who’s in office.
Bild roasts YouTube for stifling free speech in Germany after
court rules it was wrong to delete Covid-19 interviews
12 Oct, 2021 13:45
YouTube censorship of Covid-19 debate is a “dangerous encroachment” on the freedom of speech, an editor at leading German tabloid Bild has said, after the platform deleted two videos of an online debate on the pandemic.
The preliminary injunction was issued by the Cologne Regional Court in response to a legal challenge filed by the people behind the #allesaufdentisch (#EverythingOnTheTable) online campaign. It’s basically a collection of interviews with various experts and public figures about the Covid-19 pandemic that the initiators touted as a “wide-ranging, fact-based, open and factual discourse” on their website. Some of them challenged the government handling of the pandemic and raised all sorts of controversial vaccine-related issues.
YouTube found two of those interviews unfit for its hosting and erased them. The flagged videos showed discussions with mathematics professor Stephan Luckhaus and the neurobiologist Gerald Huther. The court called YouTube’s move “unjustified”, saying that the platform failed to explain which exact parts of the interviews it deemed in violation of its community rules for health-related content, according to German media.
The explanation of why the videos were deleted was kept pretty vague, claiming that some opinions about the vaccination against Covid-19 went against the scientific consensus. Overall, the videos contained “a large number of clearly permissible statements”, the court said, which gave credence to the plaintiffs’ argument that YouTube had unfairly restricted their freedom of expression. The injunction said the court decision can be appealed.
The #allesaufdentisch campaign was launched in late September and was considered a spiritual successor of a similar #allesdichtmachen (#CloseEverythig) anti-lockdown online movement, which tilted more to satirical content.
Critics say the newer interviews are a mixture of justified criticism, trivialities and “targeted disinformation”, as the daily Die Zeit described it. But many people believe the public deserves the right to see those opinions and judge their validity for themselves, without interference from American tech giants.
Jan Schafer, the political director of the influential German tabloid Bild, hailed the court’s decision, calling YouTube’s increasingly broad use of censorship a “dangerous encroachment” on public discourse in Germany.
Bild was the first to obtain and cover the court injunction on Sunday evening. It remains unclear how much influence the opinion of the German justice system will have on US-based Google, the owner of YouTube.
Basically, none, unless there is strong legislation, or very large fines or lawsuits.
Last month, YouTube shut down two popular channels of RT DE, the Berlin-based German-language version of RT, using the same “Covid-19 misinformation” justification. The decision caused a major rift in German-Russian relationships, as Moscow accused Berlin of tacitly approving the move, if not orchestrating it behind the scene. Germany denied the allegation.
RT DE has been facing an increasingly hostile environment in Germany, with local banks refusing to serve it and some media outlets branding it a Russian propaganda arm bombarding Germans with misinformation. RT DE turned to German courts to defend its reputation from what it argued to be slanderous accusations, securing injunctions in its favor.
Bild was in no rush to defend RT DE from YouTube censorship. In fact, it described the erasure of its channels as a blow to “the central component of [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] disinformation campaign” and lamented that the channels’ content remained available on other platforms, reaching “hundreds of thousands” of viewers.
Daily Express retracts story on Russia ‘stealing’ Sputnik V vaccine recipe, but the original fake-news publisher the Sun persists
12 Oct, 2021 18:40
(L) Screenshot © express.co.uk; (R) Screenshot © thesun.co.uk
The Daily Express has retracted the claim Russia stole the coronavirus vaccine recipe from UK’s AstraZeneca, replacing it with a statement by Sputnik V’s developers. The Sun merely appended a quote and stands by its false story.
In a Monday ‘bombshell,’ the Sun claimed UK spies “have proof” that Moscow’s flagship Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, was actually inspired by documents “swiped” from AstraZeneca “by a foreign agent in person.” The Express later published its own story, citing the Sun.
On Tuesday, however, the latter tabloid retracted the story entirely – leaving the original headline, but replacing the copy with the text of a statement by the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the outfit that funded Sputnik V’s development at the Gamaleya National Research Center in Moscow.
“The article also contained false information. As an apology, we are happy to set the record straight,” the Express noted in the correction.
The RDIF statement explains that Sputnik V uses two human adenovirus vectors, whereas the AstraZeneca jab opted for a chimpanzee adenovirus. Sputnik V, which is the world’s first registered vaccine against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, was also based on years of prior research in the field – a fact that’s easily verifiable via public records.
“Rather than spreading fake stories, the UK media and Government services should better protect the reputation of AstraZeneca, a safe and efficient vaccine that is constantly attacked by competitors in the media with facts taken out of context,” the RDIF said.
The Sun has not retracted or corrected Monday’s article, however. The tabloid merely added a one-sentence quote from a London PR firm representing the RDIF to the end of the article, describing the original story as “another fake news and blatant lie based on anonymous sources.”
Monday’s claims by British spies, laundered by the tabloid of Hillsborough infamy, drew sharp criticism in Moscow. Gennady Onishchenko, a lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party who previously served as head of Russia’s health authority and a presidential aide, said that the people involved in the story ought to be fired and to seek psychiatric help.
“I suggest they send the Sun’s journalists for a psychological evaluation,” he told RIA Novosti. “And the MI6 employees should be fired for losing the ability to do their jobs.”
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