Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

Part 1: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Amer... Part 2: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer...

Some thoughts:

The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).

So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all.

As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better.

Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process.

One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates tons of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else).

So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment."

Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.

Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.

There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.

The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).

This trust in "local" news is often misplaced given how many local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have been subsumed by larger interests.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-s...

There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be thoughtful about their use of any media.