An AP/NORC poll finds that 45% of Americans have little or no confidence at all in the news media. That figure breaks down to 61% of Republicans, about a quarter of Democrats, and one in three independents. Elsewhere in the survey, early three quarters of all adults say the news media is contributing to the political polarization of America.
“The American people know when they're being lied to,” Nicholas Fondacaro, speaking for the Media Research Center, says of the national media that twisted, exaggerated, and lied during Donald Trump’s populist campaign for president and his one term in the White House.
Because the liberal media mirrored the radical “Resist” movement opposing Trump, Fondacaro predicts many news outlets will never regain the trust of the American public now that Trump’s accusation of “fake news” was proven over and over again.
As if on cue, ABC News helpfully showed an example of that bias when it recently interviewed Robert Kennedy Jr. now that he has entered the Democrat presidential primary. The son of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, the interview allowed Kennedy to explain why he is running and why Joe Biden doesn’t deserve a second term. In a bizarre decision, however, ABC News cited “editorial judgement” for editing Kennedy’s remarks about the controversial COVID-19 shot. The liberal activist is most famously known for one issue, his vocal opposition to vaccines, so the heart-damaging, virus-passing, efficacy-challenged, experimental virus is a ripe target for criticism. Yet his comments were tossed.
Reacting to ABC’s editing decision, Fondacaro says Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines is a “bread and butter” topic for the longtime activist, so ABC News knew he would bring up the COVID-19 shot. This is the same left-wing media, he says, that supposedly defends the right for people to “speak their truth” except when the media decides what debates are not allowed.
Some journalists refuse to cower
As far as the future of journalism, the public is watching independent-minded journalists who lean left flee from Democrat-defending newsrooms. Some of the so-called “Twitter files” were entrusted to journalist Matt Taibbi, who voted for Biden, but who wanted to document the collusion between our government and the social media website.
Glenn Greenwald, a former Salon and Guardian writer, co-founded website The Intercept with the goal of promoting and defending independent journalism. He now writes on Substack after quitting in 2020 and accusing the website of censoring his unfavorable coverage of Biden.
Bari Weiss, a former New York Times editorial page editor, accused that newsroom of left-wing groupthink when she left in 2020 after documenting anti-Semitism and wokeness in a parting letter. She has now formed a news website called The Free Press.
Fondacaro says those journalists are proving there is a way to dig for the truth and report it fairly, and the public is now witnessing a new direction in journalism.
“We are seeing them more,” he says, “with finding certain journalists that they believe are telling the truth, or who are willing to have a record of speaking the actual truth to power, instead of getting into bed with them.”
