POLL: Trust In Corporate Media Is Gone, Alternate News Sources Dominate
Trump’s decisive electoral victory destroyed corporate media. A new poll confirms the diagnosis.
In reelecting Donald Trump, voters told the stodgy old newspapers and cable news outlets they aren’t needed anymore. A new poll confirms the worst fears in corporate board rooms accustomed to influencing the outcomes of elections via media bias and propaganda: more people have told them to just get lost.
According to a poll conducted by the League of American Workers, 61 percent of voters believed the media favored the campaign of Kamala Harris. An eye-popping 49 percent agreed that “media coverage intended to support Kamala Harris ultimately harmed her campaign.”
Steve Cortes, founder of the League of American Workers, elaborated at his Substack: only 23 percent of voters 18–24 years old said the press did not show systemic bias towards Harris.
The 2024 election cycle saw Donald Trump complete his triumphant political comeback, while Republicans took control both houses of Congress. Many post-mortems by the corporate media examined the reasons Kamala Harris lost, while failing to look inward at their own failures. The legacy media outlets, so accustomed to controlling the prevailing narrative for voters over a period of decades, panicked over their sudden loss of influence amid the rise of alternative media.
Even now, they fret—without any sense of irony or self-awareness—that "the president-elect will declare the media dead."
Lesley Stahl worried sick that the 'legacy media is dead':
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) December 11, 2024
Lesley Stahl: "I'm extremely worried about the press. I despair. I worry greatly. We're at the point where if the POTUS is going to say 'Legacy media is dead'. I'm very dark about it."
Never been more optimistic. pic.twitter.com/8a2y3NMJA5
Can Mainstream Media Restore the Trust of News Consumers?
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi recently went on Fox News to discuss the sorry state of affairs in corporate media. He says it could take years for viewers to begin to trust the worst peddlers of misinformation and propaganda:
Well I think for a certain sector of the corporate press they've just made so many mistakes and not owned up to them that I think it's going to be a bridge too far for most audiences. Trust is a human thing. You can't mechanize it. And in the journalism business when you make mistakes you have to stand in front of the camera and own up to it or else audiences will never again trust you. And there are years and years of errors about major consequential news cycle-dominating stories like Russiagate and COVID where the networks and major dailies have simply not come forward and said "Yeah, we screwed up" and they have to do that if they're going to get audience back. But they refuse to and I just don't think that's -- they're ever going to learn.
The voters saw through the slime all throughout the 2024 election cycle. They also saw through the media propping up a clearly unwell President Biden; they saw through the full propaganda blitz that began when Donald Trump first ran in the 2016 Republican primary; they saw through the 80-plus percent negative coverage Trump received over his time in politics.
As Restoration News reported in the aftermath of Election Day, a minuscule sector of Americans still trust the media:
The institutional Left thought they had this in the bag. Their ace in the hole? The corporate media ecosystem, over which they had complete control. They controlled the message. They controlled the narrative, and the narrators. They controlled what was reported—and what was left out.
But a funny thing happened on the way to dragging Trump through the mainstream media mud. The voters saw through their slime. According to Brent Bozell of Media Research Center, only seven percent of Americans trust the news—fully 93 percent hold the media in such low regard they will not listen to its messages.
To the extent to which the media continues blatantly lying about Donald Trump, Republicans, and the issues that matter to voters, they will continue to wander in the wilderness. In the days following Trump’s victory, many liberals and left-leaning voters expressed shock on social media about the “Very Fine People” hoax. A flood of them expressed amazement when they finally saw the unedited version of Trump’s remarks about the tragic events in Charlottesville in 2017, which proved he condemned neo-Nazis and did not condone them.The leftist media's coverage of Donald Trump was 85% negative, even after someone shot him in the head.
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) November 11, 2024
Americans' trust in the media is the lowest in recorded history.
The media's negative coverage of Donald Trump backfired.@BrentBozell @Marklevinshow @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/xcIkoEklwp
Restoration News included this X exchange in previous reporting, but it’s worth reproducing. With the benefit of a couple of weeks of hindsight, it is impossible to overstate the significance of how this affected the election.
This type of admission happened over… and over… and over again for days following the election. What else, indeed, did they lie about? Covid? Vaccines? BLM riots? Hunter's laptop? Russia? Biden’s health? Biden’s economy? Biden’s border?
All of the above.
No wonder Joe Rogan’s podcast averages more listens than the nightly news broadcasts of all the major news networks—combined. According to Statista:
Social media ranks as the most popular daily news source among adults between 18 and 44 years old, and, interestingly, 45 to 64-year-olds were marginally more likely to go to social media to keep themselves up to date than to watch network news. This left those aged 65 years and above the only remaining group with a clear preference for network news, and newspapers were also among the least used news sources for this demographic. Indeed, print news publications have long struggled to retain audiences, but this growing trend to move online rather than get news via television could foreshadow the gradual decline of TV news. Primetime cable news network viewership is falling, and after a surge in viewers in 2020, fell to new lows in 2023. That year, CNN and MSNBC recorded an average of less than 130 thousand primetime viewers aged 25 to 54 years, and leading network Fox had less than half the viewers recorded five years earlier.
Meanwhile, podcast news is very gradually gaining ground among younger audiences. A higher percentage of Gen Z consumers use podcasts for news daily than network or cable news, and young consumers are also more likely to consider podcasts a trustworthy news source than older adults. However, the relationship between news consumption and trust in news does not always work in the way one might expect.
The only question that remains is how long it will take the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NPR, ABC, NBC to regain trust—or even whether they can regain it at all.
(READ MORE: The CDC Recommends 38 Doses of Vaccines for Babies in the First 15 Months)
