Americans Distrust of Mass Media: Gallup Article

Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media BY Megan Brenan

This article features an eye-opening graph that plots how much trust in the media Democrats have versus Independents and Republicans. It’s 73% for Democrats, 36% for Independents and 10% (!) for Republicans.  

This graph could confirm what the right claims: the media leans left and their Democrat audience trusts these sources precisely because they share the same worldview. I have liberal friends who believe their news sources are 100% objective with no bias and mock anyone who dares to watch Fox News because Fox is biased and unreliable. However, the chart (below) produced by AllSides shows that the “mainstream” networks such as ABC, CBS, MSNBC and NBC fall into Lean Left or Left categories. The main outlets that fall into the Center category include the BBC, NPR, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. Examples of Right leaning sources: New York Post, Reason, The Federalist, National Review, and of course the much-reviled Fox News.

This article (Why Being ‘Anti-Media’ Is Now Part Of The GOP Identity By Meredith Conroy) from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight tries to build a case that Republicans live in a bubble because they predominantly rely on Fox News while Democrats show more balance. “Hostility and distrust of the news media, in other words, has become a point of political identity among Republicans.” (I would argue that hostility and distrust of Fox News has become a point of political identity among Democrats.)

Conroy refers to a finding in a study conducted by the Pew Research Center in which Republicans heavily rely on Fox News over other news sources.

“This finding stands in stark contrast with the views of Democrats, who said they trusted a variety of news sources [Note: emphasis added], and it marks a further decline in Republicans’ trust of other news sources since Pew last conducted a similar survey in 2014.”

The comment that I emphasized above about Democrats trusting “a variety of news sources” caught my attention so I looked up the Pew Research studied that was cited in this article. 

The Pew website shows a chart (shown below) with the top five sources for Democrats were: CNN (67%), NBC News (61%), ABC News (60%), CBS News (59%), and PBS (56%). As I noted above, the AllSides site rates all of these sources except PBS as Lean Left or Left. The chart for Republicans has this breakdown: Fox News (65%), ABC News (33%), CBS News (30%), Hannity (radio) (30%), and NBC News (30%). While Republicans clearly favor Fox News about a third of them still get news from sources that are considered on the Left. Meanwhile, Democrats rely on CNN as much as Republicans trust Fox but almost all of their other sources fall into the Left side of the spectrum (again the exception being PBS).

I’d say the alleged “variety” of sources that Democrats trust is not a variety of political points of view. As I noted at the beginning many of my liberal friends believe their news sources are completely unbiased and totally objective when they are not. What bothers me is that they claim Republicans live in a news bubble when in reality they're in their own bubble.

Scott Adams on Mind Hacks

 While I rarely link to someone's Twitter post this one by Scott Adams was too good to miss.

Here is the tweet thread in case the link doesn't work.

Here’s a reframe that will change some people’s lives forever: Your mind is the outcome of genetics, traumas and hacks.

If you don’t learn to hack (program) your own brain, the default is that you are little more than genes and traumas.

An example of a brain hack is education. It is a conscious choice to physically alter your brain via learning. Another hack is intelligent skill stacking.

Associating self-rewards with habits you want to deepen is a hack.

Learning to reframe your experiences is a hack. Learning to see reality as subjective is a hack. Learning to avoid “emotion pollution” from entertainment products is a hack.

Reframing sleep as a skill that can be learned is a hack.

Learning to put things in context is a hack. Practicing optimism is a hack.

If you make it your system (habit) to routinely learn and test new hacks, you become the author of your own mind, and — because your experience of reality is subjective — the author of your own experience.

Be the hack, not the trauma.