Munk Debates holds Debate over whether Mainstream Media deserves trust.
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They recently held a debate on the resolution: “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media.”
Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi argued for the resolution. Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg argued against it.
Before the debate, they polled the audience for their opinion and the poll came out 48% agreeing with “don’t trust mainstream media” and 52% disagreeing with the resolution.
After the debate, they polled the audience for their new opinion and the poll came out with 67% agreeing with the resolution and 33% disagreeing.
This is the largest swing in Munk Debate history.
Watch the debate here:
All Cretans Are Liars, Declares Cretan.Report
The debate is worth listening to.
And, even if you don’t think so, this part is the thing that media is going to have to wrestle with (even if it is unfair):
The debate is pretty good. Worth watching, even.
Perhaps if only to have better grounds for the explanation that the bad guys cheated and the good guys were inept and they should have had better arguments at their fingertips such as “you’re a Cretan”.Report
Anyone who refers to “mainstream media” as a singular is an abject idiot and not worth listening to.
But it reminds me of my fellow lefties at LGM who ritually denounce the NYT as a rightwing rag, then when some event or another happens, back up a claim with a link to…yep.
I’ve never once met anyone who actually doesn’t trust the NYT, WaPo, or CNN.
Lots of people like to say they don’t, but when push comes to shove, it’s the large mainstream media outlets people turn to for actual news.
Because there really is no alternative. When Country A fires rockets into country B, most people go to those mainstream sources.
Sure PatriotEagle1776 goes to RedPillAlpha’s YouTube channel, but he isn’t doing any actual reporting.
He and almost all other alternative media are just relaying a CNN feed or NYT or AP story., maybe decorated around the edges with their commentary.
Even FOX news doesn’t do very much independent reporting. They just rip a feed from AP and the add their graphics and opinions.
So almost everything you know about the world is coming from a small pool of media reporting.Report
But it reminds me of my fellow lefties at LGM who ritually denounce the NYT as a rightwing rag, then when some event or another happens, back up a claim with a link to…yep.
Part of the problem is that there are a number of people out there who have learned that yelling “CITATION?!?!?” really loudly mimics an actual argument. Sometimes the citation is to a place like a blog or a tweet or a facebook post and the response is something to the effect of “OH LIKE I AM GOING TO BELIEVE SOME NOBODY ON FACEBOOK!!!”
Posting a link to the NYT short-circuits this argument.
And so, many times, if someone wishes to debate online, they are stuck having to jump through the hoops thrown up at them as they shoulder the burden of proof for their argument and provide, for example, citations from the New York Times.
(Fat lot of good it does. I have reason to believe that the person screaming for citations doesn’t read them when given.)
In any case, the debate that Munk Debates held was a pretty good one. Worth watching, even.
If only to apprehend that “mainstream media” has a problem down the road. They may find themselves with as little credibility as PatriotEagle1776.
“But how did this happen?”, someone might ask. “I saw no evidence of this happening! No one cited it!”Report
Why is it a “problem” that people are “stuck having to jump through the hoops thrown up at them as they shoulder the burden of proof for their argument and provide, for example, citations from the New York Times.”?
Like, half of your very own posts are just links directly or indirectly to mainstream news sources. You obviously trust the mainstream media, so why shouldn’t we all?Report
That’s not the problem that I think is interesting here, mind. The problem that I think is interesting here is the one that shows that a good chunk of open-minded people are willing to be persuaded that “mainstream media” is not to be trusted.
Now, granted, we’re talking about people who do stuff like show up to debates *FOR FUN* and everybody knows that those people are batshit insane.
But it strikes me as the tip of an iceberg. Like, the folks who were persuaded were persuaded with argument. The people out there who are persuaded with, for lack of a better term, “vibes”, have access to the vibes behind the arguments.
As for the whole issue of “jumping through hoops”, I’ve found that people who have somewhat well-founded arguments (not necessarily *CORRECT* arguments, mind… but well-founded ones) are more than happy to provide citations and papers and links and whatnot.
If people start saying “the mainstream media… so what?”, we’re going to find ourselves in Epistemic Divorce.
And that’s bad.Report
You’re premising all of this on a framework that even you yourself don’t adhere to.
You’re assuming there exists such a thing as “mainstream media” and that this term carries meaning to a large number of people.
Most surveys of the news habits of young people show that most of their information comes from social media. But they also show that people are highly cautious about what they see and filter their news sources not according to a distinction between “mainstream” or “nonmainstream” but between “sources I trust” versus “sources I don’t”.
Your own posts here show this. Some of your posts are direct links to a “mainstream” media source like NYT, while others are links to social media accounts.
Like, you just posted the news of Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest, with a link to the social media account of the US Attorney. This is a non-mainstream source, yet you consider it trustworthy, at least with respect to matters of fact.
Yet you also make clear that you consider the US government sources like FDA and CDC to be completely untrustworthy.
Both non-mainstream sources, both government accounts, yet you trust one and not the other.
Meanwhile, you do link to “mainstream” sources like the NYT, but never to “mainstream” media like the government run Chinese news outlets.
Obviously, you consider the NYT to be trustworthy and the Chinese media untrustworthy.
Both “mainstream” but one trustworthy and one not.
“Mainstream” just doesn’t mean much to very many people including you.Report
You’re assuming there exists such a thing as “mainstream media” and that this term carries meaning to a large number of people.
Yes.
And Yes.
I think that the latter is probably more easily argued than the former.
The set of the latter contains stuff like NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and, yes, Fox. Probably doesn’t contain OANN or the wacky stuff for the channels. Contains Time and Newsweek for the magazines and not The Nation or The Weekly Standard.
Basically: You know the guy who shows up for the poker game and hasn’t been able to name the Vice-President since 1988? Has he heard of these guys?
And if the answer is “yes”, it counts as “Mainstream Media”.
Your own posts here show this. Some of your posts are direct links to a “mainstream” media source like NYT, while others are links to social media accounts.
It depends on what I’m trying to argue, mostly.
If it’s “X Happened”, I’m usually good with tweets.
If I suspect it’ll result in someone screaming “CITATION?!?!?”, I usually try to head it off at the pass by going straight for the NYT.
At which point someone might say something like “Everybody says that they hate the NYT and that they’re corporatist trash, but they keep quoting them, don’t they?”
Meanwhile, you do link to “mainstream” sources like the NYT, but never to “mainstream” media like the government run Chinese news outlets.
Criticism acknowledged and taken to heart.
Yet you also make clear that you consider the US government sources like FDA and CDC to be completely untrustworthy.
Depends on what the argument is. If it is “there’s only one safe kind of epipen!”, I tend to not think that they’re trustworthy. If, however, I’m looking for a direct quotation? Ain’t nothing better than a direct link to something that they said!
Report
Well, this just confirms my point.
You sort all your sources into buckets of “Trusted” vs. “Not”, and then put a label on the ones you trust that says “Mainstream”.
Even when a source is from a “trusted” bucket you filter it according to its source of origin.
If say, WaPo runs a story quoting an FDA source as saying “There’s only one safe kind of Epipen” next to one from the US Attorney saying they nabbed SBF, you trust one and not the other.
Because one draws from the “untrustworthy” bucket while the other doesn’t.
And I bet that debate audience is doing the same thing (and I bet even more that Murray and Taibbi do too!).
They are out there tonight reading about SBF’s arrest using NYT or WaPo or CNN, the very sources they argued passionately were untrustworthy.
Because, really, what else are they going to use? China People’s Daily? The Epoch Times?Report
It’s “trusted BUT FOR WHAT”.
It’s a tool. If I am looking for Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How? Well, good journalism should be able to provide that.
If say, WaPo runs a story quoting an FDA source as saying “There’s only one safe kind of Epipen” next to one from the US Attorney saying they nabbed SBF, you trust one and not the other.
It’s more that if I see that the FDA has only approved one kind of EpiPen in the US while the EU’s FDA analogue has approved eight, I suddenly have questions about stuff like whether the FDA is too restrictive or whether it’s been captured or whether the EMA is putting Europeans at risk.
You’d think that these questions would have answers!
Because one draws from the “untrustworthy” bucket while the other doesn’t.
We know that either the FDA is too restrictive or that the EMA is not restrictive enough or maybe even some mixture of both.
This is why it’s fun to come up with thought experiments like “let’s say that your friend got a shipment of EpiPens from his connection in Germany and it’s a brand that hasn’t been approved in the US. Is your friend putting his own life in his hands?”
And saying something like “I would think that the friend is lucky” versus “I would think that the friend is taking an unreasonable risk” gets us closer to an answer of how to think about it.
It’s not a 1 or a 0. It’s a gradient that can include “too restrictive” or “just right” or “not restrictive enough”.
Like, we can talk about these government agencies when it comes to the rescheduling of Marijuana. We can talk about them when we’re talking about EpiPens. We can talk about them when we’re talking about Thalidomide.
And we can say that they’re trustworthy here and less reliable there and it can make sense to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time.
And I bet that debate audience is doing the same thing (and I bet even more that Murray and Taibbi do too!).
Is this one of those things where I can post excerpts from the debate and then you can ask me what the response was?
Like, instead of watching it?Report
Right, trust is a gradient, from “Walter Cronkite” to “Fox & Friends”
Which is kinda my point.
You, Taibbi, and the lefties at LGM all have valid complaints about the biases and blind spots of the major media outlets.
But you all continue to use and trust them, filtering them by subject, by reporter, by issue.
So like the NYT might be judged accurate for in-depth analysis of the Ukraine invasion, but not-so-very trustworthy when reporting on the Clintons.
Or the Wall Street Journal news pages might be good, but their op-ed section a fetid swamp.
The proposition- “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media” ignores all that, and reduces it to a binary.Report
You should watch the debate.
They totally get into this!
But let’s come up with an analogy. Let’s say that there’s a coding website out there. You write code and this website is helpful. You want to do an if statement, they’ve got 12 really good ones to crib from. Want to define a hash table? They’ve got 20 good ways to do it covering 8 likely problems.
Now lets say that this website gets it right, absolutely nails it, 99% of the time.
This is a *VERY* useful tool, right? You’ll probably want to make it one of your tabs whenever you open your browser.
Now let’s look at the 99%.
How many points do you think you could lose before the website ceases to be useful as your go-to tool?
In my view, the tool ceases to be useful when it’s still about 90%. You’re going to start looking to replace it at 97% and it’s useless at 92% because you’re doing more work checking it and maybe cleaning it up than doing your job. You might as well go back to sticky notes in an O’Reilly book.
We’re not at 99% anymore.Report
How many points do you think you could lose before the website ceases to be useful as your go-to tool?
You tell me, it’s your thesis.
Upthread you listed what you consider to be “mainstream news”: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and, yes, Fox.
Do you still read them? Are you going to continue to cite them as authoritative sources?
Do you have alternative sources you trust more?Report
You tell me, it’s your thesis.
Oh, okay.
In my view, the tool ceases to be useful when it’s still about 90%. You’re going to start looking to replace it at 97% and it’s useless at 92% because you’re doing more work checking it and maybe cleaning it up than doing your job. You might as well go back to sticky notes in an O’Reilly book.
Upthread you listed what you consider to be “mainstream news”: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and, yes, Fox.
Do you still read them? Are you going to continue to cite them as authoritative sources?
Do you have alternative sources you trust more?
Yes, I still read them.
Yes, I will still cite them as authoritative on the subjects that I feel that they are still authoritative about.
Yes, I have alternative sources that I feel are authoritative on other subjects and, when it comes to those subjects, I will cite them instead.Report
So…Even after watching the debate, your news gathering habits don’t seem to have changed all that much.
And this tracks with other studies I’ve seen about the news media habits of Americans generally, that although they acknowledge shortcomings and mistakes by those mainstream news sources, they continue to use them.Report
That’s not a fair summary of my position.
But I could easily see it being a Mainstream Media summary of my position.Report
OK, so tell us how your news gathering habits have changed.Report
For one, I have twitter now. Twitter provides a large number of people who are very good at finding any given buried lede.
Additionally, and this may be a perspective thing, a news article that says “Person X says Y” used to be a good piece of evidence for Proposition Y.
Now it’s merely an article about Person X’s opinions. That’s an exceptionally important distinction when it comes to trusting the news.
Merely the pivot from the conversation being about Y to it being about how X has an opinion and that opinion is Y is *HUGE*.Report
So would it be fair to say that although you acknowledge shortcomings and mistakes by those mainstream news sources, you continue to use them along with other non mainstream sources as a way to check and verify?Report
So would it be fair to say that although you acknowledge shortcomings and mistakes by those mainstream news sources, you continue to use them along with other non mainstream sources as a way to check and verify?
Yes.
I’d compare to a website that helps with coding, actually.Report
Live by flooding the zone, die by flooding the zone.
One of the lasting legacies of the 1960s that I think is bad is knee-jerk anti-establishment views. There are good reasons and times to be anti-establishment. There is also anti-establishment pulled out of thin air argumentation. People like Tabibi and Greenwald and Weiss have a kneejerk anti-establishment view but twist it to the right while claiming to be on the left or liberals.
Unfortunately, a lot of people fall for this scam because it fits their priors.Report
To be compared to:
Once again: the part that I found most interesting was the 29% wandering away from their priors.Report
And you could engineer an opposing swing if you put four other different players on that stage.Report
That’s a very interesting proposal.
Because if I were hoping to engineer a loss on the part of the “don’t trust the media” people, I’d give the “against the proposition” two people like Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg and I’d give the “for the proposition” side someone like Matt Taibbi.
And I’d hold the debate in Canada.Report
When I see the 67/33 split, my first assumption is that all but three people walked out during the event.Report
Ah, LGM and it’s love-hate relationship with the New York Times. The very online have a dislike of the MSM (TM) because the MSM media rarely comes out and proclaims what the very online sees as the TRUTH (TM) and often acts like a business that knows it needs eyeballs. This is true regardless of where the online fall on the political spectrum. The Online Right is usually better at getting the Non-Online Right to feel suspicious about the MSM because of their shared temperament. The temperament of the Online Liberals and Non-Online Liberals tend to be very different though. Non-Online Liberals tend to be less strident and more into “Secret Disney Liberal” type thinking, so are more inclined to trust NPR or the NYT.Report
And a one off event is supposed to stand for all of mankind because?Report
It’s a college debate, Saul. It’s hardly a stand-in for 5% of North American English-speakers.
But if I was looking for an indicator for the reversal of preference falsification, I’d write something like this:
(Also, if you have 90ish minutes to spare, you should watch it. It’s a fun debate!)Report
It is one audience and I’d bet money that if Goldberg and Gladwell carried the motion or won the debate, you would not be posting this. You are posting this because it fits all your priors and was argued by substacks favorite “I’m not a reactionary but let me tell you why liberals and Democrats and lefties in general suck” contrarians.Report
I got it from the Twitters, actually.
Is there a debate that was recently won that totally fits all of your priors instead of mine?
Let me post that in a sidebar. Give me something and let me argue something that fits your priors for once. Just try to get something that could rely on the strength of the entertainment value of the link you got. It has to be fun for both sides to watch. Give people, no matter which side they are on, something to laugh at, sputter at, and then say “other people should watch this”.
I’ll do my best to get people like me to watch it.
Show me what you got.Report
To be fair, Murray is an unabashed reactionary.Report
Seems to match the polling data:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspxReport
I’m 35 minutes in and I think the lack of a definition of who or what constitutes the MSM is a bit mysterious. Taibbi cites Fox News, MSNBC, and Facebook (!?). Murray cites a bunch of Canadian papers, but only quotes columnists, who are chosen for their polemical chops.
I’m going to finish this tomorrow, but I think Gladwell makes a good point about commitment to the process from the MSM.Report
A lack of ability to say “what is mainstream” is part of the problem. 2000 channels and nothing’s on; 50000000 webpages and nobody reads the same three ones.
Say what you will about the heady days when you had channels 2, 4, 7, and UHF 20 and 50…Report
Right. But how can you debate an assertion about something so ill-defined?Report
Well, I suppose you can attempt to define it.
If *I* were to define it, I’d say something like:
Report
I actually clicked on the link and watched the opening statements.
Counter-intuitively, I thought Gladwell’s defense of the Media Processes was probably the moment when people realized that they no longer believed you could trust the Media. Basically he made a defense of 1960’s journalistic processes that we’ve seen undermined time and again by the very institutions that claim to follow the processes. It was a good defense of the idea of processes that once dominated journalism… but no one believes that the processes are adhered to. Worse, we’ve had too much exposure to the processes becoming *at best* pro forma. The ethos that gives the processes power has been subverted.
The meta story that is more interesting to me is how the Left finds itself in possession of the conservative institutions that it actively subverted… but now wants to prop-up as Authoritative. I get it, as conservative institutions they were beholden to Power… they lied to the public… they propped up an agenda that was wicked… they needed to be taken down. Until we got the keys to the front door. Now the Left are the conservators of Power, Lies and Authoritarianism. Long live the subversives…
edit to add that Gladwell’s portion I cite begins around 29min mark.Report
Yeah, there was very much an “is vs. ought” argument going on behind everything.
Ought? Heck yeah, ought! We *SHOULD* trust an ought journalism!
Is? Well. You have to understand… mistakes were made. The passive voice was utilized. The active voice is only appropriate for when our critics engage in hysterical hyperbolic bad-faith criticism that is likely funded by racists.Report
This is what I’ve been saying for a while now, that the right has found itself on the minority side of what the hippies used to call The Establishment.
And like the hippies, their primary message now is that the Establishment is corrupt and can’t be trusted.
But unlike the hippies, they have been unable to put forward a competing message that can win.
Even right here on this very thread. The proposition is put forward: “Mainstream media cannot be trusted”, and the conservatives here agree emphatically.
Then the question is asked, “What other sources are trustworthy?” And the answer is crickets.
Worse, the very people who say the media can’t be trusted, acknowledge that they still use it as their trusted source.Report
I don’t think you’re making as interesting argument as you think you are.
Subverting trust in institutions doesn’t necessarily lead to higher trust anywhere it leads to lower trust everywhere. You are here.
I think you’re kinda right about the Hippies, that’s what I’m saying… what if the Hippies get hold of the levers of power – but only like used them for good, man.Report
“Subverting trust in institutions doesn’t necessarily lead to higher trust anywhere it leads to lower trust everywhere” is precisely my point.
In the absence of a positive alternative, the subversion becomes pointless vandalism.
However, the good news is that a bunch of mainstream media figures sitting around debating “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media” is like a bunch of trust fund hippies debating the destruction of capitalism.
They fancy themselves Che Guevara but are so hopelessly invested in the system that they literally could not survive outside it.Report
See my point above, I think a big issue is that a lot of people are anti-establishment for the sake of being anti-establishment. Some of this is personal definition. Some of it is pure griffting. There seems to be an endless appetite on the right for apostates and heretics for the left even if they are people whom the left never fully trusted. All you need is the thinnest plausible left cred and you are in.Report
The polling indicates that everyone has less trust in the media except Democrats:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx
Note, especially the inflection point around 2016. Democrats spiked and stayed high. Republicans spiked down and stayed low. Independent went up and then reverted to the previous downward trend. Overall the Democratic cohort is small because in total, only 1/3 of Americans have a “significant or fair amount” of trust in the media. In contrast, 2/3 of the country has “not very much or no” trust in the media.
What is the explanation for that? Why does one ideological/political cohort have trust in the media while others, including a huge majority of Americans generally, don’t?
BTW, I agree with you that the right and left and switched sides on the establishment vs. counter-culture axis, among other things.Report
I listen to Intelligence Squared often and they use a similar format to decide the “winner” though they also allow an “undecided” option. To me, there always seems to be too much opportunity for gaming the results to put any value in pre- and post-polls as a metric. I’m much more interested in the substance of the arguments presented. Sometimes I have a clear opinion going in and sometimes not. Sometimes I have my mind changed and sometimes not. To me, the value of listening/watching debates such as these is in hearing different viewpoints and being willing to have your mind changed.
But everyone’s mileage varies.Report
Gee Matt Tiabbi debating Malcolm Gladwell, is there an outcome where they both are so shamed that we never have to hear from either of them again?Report
I’m not very far in, but Michelle Goldberg seems to be undermining her own position. Perhaps she wasn’t the best choice for this debate.Report
She has a tendency to do that. There was another Munk debate her side lost that had Jordan Peterson on the other side (https://munkdebates.com/debates/political-correctness). She spent almost all of her time talking about what a bad person Peterson was.Report
If you lose a debate to Peterson then you are very bad at debating. Most above avg college kids should be able to roast JBP.Report
I saw that one. It was a catastrophe. The topic was political correctness. Peterson’s ally addressed the question; Peterson pondered the framework ineffectively; the two opponents personally attacked Peterson. It was bizarre. The opponents couldn’t have come off more out-of-their-element if they’d showed up in lederhosen and yodeled the whole thing. That’s not hyperbole. Think of how awkward you would have felt an hour into a debate-versus-yodel, and that’s the feeling you’d have during that.Report
Yeah, it was pretty bad. Stephen Fry was the only effective debater, and he carried the result IMO.Report
I finally watched this debate, and it was reminiscent of the Peterson one. Goldberg attacked the other side personally and inaccurately, her partner accused the other side of bigotry, and the Brit actually comprehended debate. Replace Peterson’s lack of focus with Taibbi’s persistence, and I think this one was a blowout.Report
Taibbi touched on this in his closing remarks:
Part of the issue with “should people agree with the proposition ‘don’t trust mainstream media’?” is the whole issue of “should mainstream media change how they do stuff?”
If you don’t think that mainstream media should change how they do stuff, it’s very easy to argue that people should not agree with the proposition. Easy peasy.
But look at those numbers.
Maybe things will get better next year without anything changing.Report
So when Taibbi reports on this survey should we assume he is lying?
As we’ve pointed out, you yourself are in that 28% who “do not have very much confidence” yet you also report to using mainstream media as part of your daily diet of news consumption.
And also as you yourself have pointed out, your level of trust fluctuates wildly, from “none” to “a great deal”, depending on the source, the issue, and your priors.
Shouldn’t we assume the same is true for the respondents in that poll?Report
So when Taibbi reports on this survey should we assume he is lying?
I’d say that you don’t have to assume anything. You can just look at the poll that I linked to. You don’t need to involve Taibbi at all. You can say something like “I don’t know whether Taibbi is trustworthy. I will look it up myself.”
Then you can look at whether Gallup is trustworthy. Wikipedia has a section dedicated to Gallup’s accuracy here.
Now, if you “trust” Taibbi, you can just take his word for it.
But, if you don’t want to trust Taibbi, you can use him as a starting point and then look at the data yourself.
The same for “mainstream media”.
And also as you yourself have pointed out, your level of trust fluctuates wildly, from “none” to “a great deal”, depending on the source, the issue, and your priors.
Shouldn’t we assume the same is true for the respondents in that poll?
If we do, does that lead us to the conclusion that we can ignore the issue of “should mainstream media change how they do stuff?”
That would make life a lot easier.
Heck, maybe the people who took the poll lied.Report
As the poll shows, it is primarily conservatives who distrust media.
Maybe you look at that and say “There must be something wrong with media!”
I don’t reach the same conclusion.
Especially since the distrust appears to have swung the Senate and several statehouse to our favor.
If the Newsmax crowd wants to keep sending their money to the pillow guy and refusing to vote because it’s all rigged by the ChiComs and (((Globalists))) well, I’m good with that.Report
Indeed, but the poll also says, and I’m copying and pasting this:
14% of Republicans and 27% of independents saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence.
27%? That’s bad.
I mean, if we had 90% of Democrats and 73% of Independents, we could laugh at how away from the mainstream the conservatives were.
Maybe most of the so-called “Independents” are just “Conservatives” who still want to get invited to dinner parties.
At 27%, independents’ confidence is at the lowest point in the trend. This is also the first time that it has fallen below 30%. Meanwhile, 41% of independents say they have no trust at all and 32% do not have very much.Report
I think it’s based on this polling:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx
Note that the conservative/liberal numbers differ from Republican/Democrat/Independent.
For example, 71% of liberal Democrats and 70% of moderate Democrats have a “great deal or fair amount of trust and confidence,” while liberal independents are at 47% and moderate independents are at 33%.
Between 2016 and 2017, Democratic support for the media jumped by 21 points, and Republican support plummeted by 18 points. Both have roughly stayed the same since. Independents jumped into support by 12 points from 2016-2018 but have fallen since by 15 points.
I think there are a few possible explanations for this, the most obvious being a reaction by the media and partisans to Trump and coverage of Trump.Report
I’ll be that guy who not only followed the link and even looked at the PDF. My labors are almost Herculean.
This is how the MSM is defined “such as newspapers, T.V. and
radio –”
That. That is ……..pretty crappy. Totally worthless might be closer. For one thing it’s mixing multiple industries with very different advertisers, listeners and dynamics. Since our media is often highly polarized it’s impossible to split the polarization dynamic from distrust of “MSM.” Also this tells us nothing about peoples actual habits because i’ll bet plenty of people hate “the MSM” but love Fox or OAN. Which is fine if that is what they like but makes this question silly. If you dont’ trust NBC but love Fox are you against the MSM? No not at all and not based on this.
Survey says this tells us very little.Report
First, Gallup in this current and historical polling does not call it the “mainstream” media, but “mass media.” Whether the average American who isn’t obsessed with politics believes there is a difference is anyone’s guess.
Secondly, they’ve been tracking this since 1972. Certainly, a lot has changed in that time span with Americans generally, and the media and partisans in particular. I’m not sure you’ve made an effective case that their methodology is “totally worthless” but if you’ve got something better, then I’d be interested in seeing it.Report
I agree the genera feelings about the media is fair enough to track. But there isnt’ anything else there. Mass media; yup correct that is what it says, which also makes so much of this thread/debate silly. It’s not about nebulously defined MSM. It’s just a general everybody distrusts media more. It’s not even possible to figure which media people hate.
I don’t have better data but the data here doesn’t support much of anthing that has been talked about other then people trust “the media” much less. It doesn’t take much to find people who hate the media but also love some of the media.Report
That’s…one explanation.
But see, it’s the comments right here at OT that give me confidence in mainstream media.
Over the past decades, conservatives have constructed a parallel world of institutions.
Media like Fox News, universities like Liberty University, polling outfits like Rasmussen, think tanks like AEI.
But even so, these institutions lack respect and authority, even from conservatives themselves.
When a conservative is challenged, they inevitably post a link to the New York Times or other mainstream publication, but never to Fox or Newsmax.
They will cite a study from Harvard, but never Liberty University. They will cite Gallup but not Rasmussen.
And we see in these comments that even for conservatives, mainstream media forms the staple of their news diet even if they supplement it with other sources like social media.Report
Part of the problem is that there are a number of people out there who have learned that yelling “CITATION?!?!?” really loudly mimics an actual argument. Sometimes the citation is to a place like a blog or a tweet or a facebook post and the response is something to the effect of “OH LIKE I AM GOING TO BELIEVE SOME NOBODY ON FACEBOOK!!!”
Posting a link to the NYT short-circuits this argument.
And so, many times, if someone wishes to debate online, they are stuck having to jump through the hoops thrown up at them as they shoulder the burden of proof for their argument and provide, for example, citations from the New York Times.Report
Oh, but think of how you could totally blow away someone with a link to say, a really insightful in depth journalistic reporting from Newsmax, or a deep study on evolutionary biology from Liberty University or maybe a definitive analysis of climate change from American Enterprise Institute.
Think of how owned and embarrassed the liberals would be by those lofty and prestigious institutions! No way they could refute that!
Why bother with such birdcage liner as the NYT or Guardian? After all, no one trusts those guys, right?Report
If the point of asking for a citation were to read the citation, you’d have an excellent point.
Sadly, the point of asking for a citation is to short-circuit the argument. “Oh, you don’t have a cite? Guess I win!”
“Here’s a citation from Facebook.”
“Oh, like I’m going to read a citation from some Facebook nobody.”
“Here’s a citation from Newsmax.”
“Newsmax? That’s not a credible source! Not for a second!”
“Here’s a citation from the New York Times, then.”
“How come everybody hates the New York Times so much but whenever they get asked for a citation, they always go straight to the NYT, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. It really makes you think.”Report
Except it’s not just conservatives – as noted, “liberal moderates” have 47% trust while “liberal Democrats” have 70% trust – a substantial difference between self-identified liberals.
Point being, partisanship seems to be a bigger factor than ideology.
Secondly, liberals/partisan Democrats/progressives have certainly created their own groupthink outlets as well, it’s not only the right wing that’s playing that game, although the right-wing has been playing it for longer.
Finally, I don’t know how one would explain the huge shifts from 2016-2018 as anything other than the effect of Trump, but if you’ve got an alternative explanation, then I’d like to hear it.Report
One thing about the NYT and other prestige outlets that, at least from my perspective, is worth pointing out: Not everything they report is treated the same.
In other words, people treat reporting differently depending on the subject and other factors.
In my own case, I think a lot of NYT reporting is good, especially on foreign and national security developments. In contrast, I think NYT reporting on culture war topics is generally bad, especially stuff that was generated on Twitter.Report
I don’t have a subscription to NYT but there’s certainly an odd but similar schizophrenia with the Post. Lots of the hard news pieces still have the tone of an agency or a newswire. You read those, and you take it with the grain of salt you do with anything with a view from nowhere approach.
There may be questions but it doesn’t feel like total agitprop or anything.
But then you have other reporting characterized as ‘news’ on some internet or culture war topic where half the piece is written in a strange passive voice, includes nothing but quotes from unnamed sources or groups with obvious agendas (but who for some reason are treated as neutral experts) and at the end doesn’t seem to include any kind of hard assertions of fact. Sometimes it’s so strange it seems like it doesn’t even belong in the same publication yet there it is. That’s where you really start to wonder.Report
That’s the vibe I get too. I have very little faith in any reporting on topics tied to culture war stuff and treat all of it very skeptically until proven otherwise.
The poster child example of this was the dozen or so stories written by the NYT and other outlets about the kerfuffle on the national mall a couple of years ago between a kid in a MAGA hat, a Native American beating a drum, and some Black Israelites.
The whole thing was stupid, served no purpose, was not newsworthy, and was inaccurately reported, but it got extensively covered thanks to Twitter groupthink and outrage and succeeded in getting media outlets a lot of clicks.Report
You seem to assume that “mainstream media” isn’t trusted because MSM is untrustworthy and needs to change. Perhaps. Yet it’s also true that unrelenting attacks on the legitimacy of MSM have come from right wing figures like Limbaugh, Carlson, and Trump for decades now. Sometimes they may be identifying significant bias, but it’s also clearly an attempt to wrest power away from those sources to bolster their own authority among their followers.
I don’t have full access to this book chapter, “Sowing Distrust of the News Media as an Electoral Strategy” but here is the abstract:
“Currently, trust in the media is low among those of all political affiliations, but it is substantially lower among Republicans than Democrats. Scholars have investigated a variety of plausible causes of this increasing distrust of the media, yet the largest source of this change seems to be increasing amounts of criticism of the institutional media from politicians and political pundits. This trend also has important consequences for how people acquire political information and make election decisions. Those who distrust the news media are more likely to consume information from partisan news outlets, and are more resistant to a fairly wide variety of media effects on public opinion. Because it can partially insulate one’s supporters from many types of media persuasion, partisan attacks on the news media have become an increasingly prominent political tactic.”
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28311/chapter-abstract/215018520?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=trueReport
I consider this to be a good thing and am happy to see it continue.
The Meadows texts are very revealing in this regard.
They show that large numbers of senior Republicans have swallowed the kool-aid of right-wing misinformation and live in an epistemic bubble.
This makes them marks for grifters (ref. Herschel Walker’s campaign, it’s lifeblood sucked dry by parasite con men) or just flat out incompetent at manipulating the machinery of power, such as the fantastical suggestion for Trump to declare “Marshall Law”.
And further, the closed bubble alienates the fanatics from ordinary Americans.
Most Americans aren’t highly political so when they see a Newsmax video of MTG or some other lunatic raving incoherently about Jewish space lasers causing forest fires, it only helps our cause.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a grim development that puts our country at risk, but better to battle googly eyed fanatics than steely clear eyed realists.Report
You seem to assume that “mainstream media” isn’t trusted because MSM is untrustworthy and needs to change.
It’s more that it might not be the mainstream media’s fault that it is not trusted, but it sure as heck is mainstream media’s problem.
But maybe mainstream media doesn’t need to do anything.
Sometimes they may be identifying significant bias, but it’s also clearly an attempt to wrest power away from those sources to bolster their own authority among their followers.
The significant bias does a good job of undermining the other stuff.
Above, I make a comparison between a website that has a 99% accuracy rate when it comes from cribbing stuff and a website that has a 92% accuracy rate.
The 99% one is *VITAL*. It’s a homepage!
The 92% one? Useless.
“But isn’t 92% pretty good?”
Depends on how badly you need to trust what it says.
“Those who distrust the news media are more likely to consume information from partisan news outlets, and are more resistant to a fairly wide variety of media effects on public opinion.”
How should I feel about “a fairly wide variety of media effects on public opinion”?
Gotta say, my immediate response is not “oh, media effects on public opinion are probably neutral or good”. At *BEST*, it’s “I need a hell of a lot more information.”Report
Online liberals don’t like the MSM media either. Lots of online people don’t like the MSM. They just don’t agree what the alternative should be.Report
Matt Taibbi is clearly wrong about the state of journalism. I believe that journalists out there are doing a lot of creative, independent thinking. Like, look at what these different journalists came up with on Twitter, on the subject of Matt Taibbi:
NBC News’s Ben Collins – Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating s***.
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan – Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world’s richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you’re speaking truth to power.
gaming journalist Jason Schreier – Editors are great not just because they make your work sharper, but because you can ask them things like “Hey should I be doing PR work for the richest man on the planet” and they’ll say “Nah”
CNN’s Bassey Etim – Thats my read, too — that the appropriate policy people made a call without government interference and were later overturned on appeal.More curious about the process now… A journalist agrees to terms they refuse to describe to do social media PR for the richest man alive??
Media Matters’ John Knefel – The Taibbi thread is a great example of overwriting when you don’t have the goods but you don’t want to admit you’re just doing pr for the world’s richest person
Tom Scocca, formerly of Slate – One minute you’re scourging Goldman Sachs, the next you’re doing PR for the richest man in the world, funny old life
Hannah Gais (miscellaneous outlets) – “jOuRnaLiSm iS aBoUt SpEaKiNg tRuTh to pOwEr,” i, a supposedly serious journalist, say as i write up a press release for one of the richest people in the world on a site that they own and are desperate to drive traffic toReport
Lol. Could do this with any group. Just cherry picking. And doesn’t prove they are right or wrong. They could all be correct.Report
Completely off topic, having nothing to do with media distrust:
DeSantis announces a new anti-CDC: “Our CDC, at this point, anything they put out, you just assume, at this point, that it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on … we’re creating what we’re calling the Public Health Integrity Committee.”
Attention Republicans:
Do not pay attention to public health authorities!
Do not get vaccinated.
Do not wash your hands before preparing food.
Do not refrigerate egg salad.
If you stick a fork into an electrical outlet, somewhere in California a purple haired lesbian will be owned.
Men, to improve virility, stand on your head naked with legs spread wide to tan your testicles. The best venue for this is a public park or school playground.
Do not trust mainstream financial advisors!
Balance your retirement portfolio with 80% crypto, 10%Trump Steaks, and 10% gold commemorative coins from Franklin Mint.
The liberal mainstream media don’t want you to hear this but Jesus is counting you, Patriot.Report
News Media Enthusiasts might turn to the Mainstream Media to provide answers to the question “Why might some people not trust the CDC?”
This article from NBC News could provide a couple of helpful pieces of information that might answer that question.
Of course, someone might see that and not think “Why might some people not trust the CDC?”
They’d probably find the article less interesting. Perhaps even question why the Mainstream Media would undercut the CDC like that.Report
Like I said, if elderly Republicans in a swing state want to trust their health to Ron DeSantis, I say, please proceed, Governor.
And if Republicans, especially older Republicans in purplish districts, refuse flu vaccines this winter and walk thru crowded public places maskless, I will be owned, so terribly terribly owned.Report
Hrm. That’s an interesting question.
Flu shots.
Has our national experience with the efficacy of mRNA shots changed our opinion of the Flu Shot?
That’s probably something that will take 5 years to sort out.Report
Format (its silly) and definitional (its more complicated than i suspect a clown like Murray, or a hack like Gladwell, can fit into a whole book, much less a short debate) issues aside, this is at least one thing the right and the left agree on. That the mainstream media was deeply biased (e.g., in its coverage of WMD in Iraq) was once a pretty standard progressive, not just leftist position, even.
I suspect that the combination of comically bad right wing mainstream and fringe news media, and a now decades-long anti-any journalism they don’t like campaign on the right has turned anti-MSM sentiment into a partisan issue for a lot of liberals. Fortunately, most leftists don’t care about liberal-conservative partisan issues.
It doesn’t help that Taibbi — who just a few years ago was beloved enough by liberals that they freaked out when his just absolutely disgusting and disturbing past came out (again, for like the 5th time; I mean, it’s not like anyone paying attention didn’t know he was a horrible person, at least while in Russia), not because what he did was inexcusable (even though it was), but because they thought it was a right wing smear campaign timed to undermine his criticism of Trump — is now in the midst of his right turn, and the resulting tour of the worst of mainstream right wing media.
All that said, the format really is silly, particularly drawing any conclusions from the polling they do.Report
As deeply silly as the format is, I want to say that it’s vaguely traditional. When I was in debate club back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth, that’s more or less how we did it. Opening statements, arguments, rebuttals, closing statements. (They gave us a stack of Time Magazines prior to the debate for us to crib from. “In the issue of Time Magazine released on September 3, 1990, we see that Chemical Weapons Readiness remains a deep concern for the United States Military!”)
Maybe we could have a new format for this sort of thing. But I’m not going to hold that they’re still doing stuff the old way against them.
The old criticism of the MSM having blinders is one that is familiar to all media critics. The whole issue of “They’re not Conservative! They’re LIBERAL!” versus “they’re not Leftists! They’re CORPORATIST!” is a fun one.
We agree that they’re bad. We just don’t agree at the root issue of why.
As for Taibbi, yeah, he’s awful. Occasionally funny, though. He’s probably still reeling and not understanding why he’s considered right wing. “I was left wing just 20 minutes ago! I wrote a book called ‘Insane Clown President’!”
Hey. When it comes to fashion, you can’t rest on your laurels. Nothing is more embarrassing than someone with a manbun in 2022.
AS FOR THE CONCLUSION!
Well, there are several links to the same Gallup poll above that talks about how much the MSM is trusted. Yeah, there’s a gap between the Democrats and the Republicans but what *I* see as the issue is the gap between the Independents and the Democrats.
If the MSM becomes useless, then we’re going to be fully and completely in Epistemic Divorce.
And that will be bad.Report
The key is to understand why the MSM is bad. This will help people to understand when to trust it, when not to trust it, and what we might do to fix it and our trust in it generally. Unfortunately, the dominant anti-MSM narrative is simply that it is filled with cultural marxists who actively suppress right wing views, which is an answer that won’t help those questions, because it’s less causal or critical analysis than it is an airing of a grievance.
As for the format, it should be reserved for high school competitions.
Added: There is, of course, an extensive literature on the left exploring why mainstream media is bad. I mean, everyone’s heard of Chomsky, but it goes well beyond that (and goes back to at least the 19th century).Report
Well, if you see the MSM as a tool that is trustworthy in this situation but completely unreliable in those other situations, that’s *PERSONALLY* useful but not useful at large.
If we do a better job of teaching Media Literacy, that would be better for everyone… but if we’re reaching the point where we’re expecting Masters’ Degree levels of the ability to process a firehose, I can’t help but think that we’re not checking our privilege.
Maybe we could have something like “ethics” on the part of the MSM that doesn’t take advantage of the lack of processing power out there.Report
I don’t think it requires a masters level, or even a bachelors level ability to understand what’s wrong with the media. I think it does require attention and effort, though, and “the media is too woke” requires much less effort than trying to understand the complex interplay of power, money, and ideology.Report
Hey, I’m not talking about “what’s wrong with it”.
I’m specifically wrestling with “when to trust it, when not to trust it, and what we might do to fix it and our trust in it generally.”
That is a particularly tough row to hoe. More than that, I’d bet $5 that if you and I both wrote a “list of top 5 things we need to do to fix it”, maybe we’d only have 2 of the same items on both of them.Report
Is there any thought of putting an upvote feature in the comments on this site? Because it would save me from feeling compelled to comment here that I agree entirely.Report
The standard conservative complaint, embedded in this post, is that American institutions have been captured by the left, and are suffering as a result.
The media are suffering a decline in quality because of stifling curbs on free speech due to political correctness, universities are declining because of wokeness and critical race theory, the military is weak because they let lesbians in, and so on and so forth.
But as I mentioned upthread, conservatives have constructed a parallel set of institutions- universities like Liberty University and Bob Jones University, news media like Fox and Newsmax and OAN.
But here is the interesting question. If the conservative theory were true, that universities are stifling creativity and free thought, then we would expect that all the world’s free thinkers and brilliant minds would migrate to Liberty University.
After all, there they are able to speak freely, think whatever radical thoughts they want, cast off the deadening shackles of political correctness! They would bring forth new ideas, new technology, new inventions and works of scholarship that the old dying woke universities would envy.
And the conservative news media would be free to tell the truth however politically incorrect it might be, and speak truth to power. Serious brilliant minds, latter day Edward R. Murrows and Woodward and Bernstiens would speak truth to power and everyone would see how superior conservative media is to the old Pravda-like New York Times!
But…none of that has happened, right?
There are no brilliant works of scholarship coming out of Bob Jones University. No sharp, incisive journalists working at Newsmax.
Brilliant scholars, sharp insightful journalists, the public at large, even conservatives themselves, consider these institutions as mediocre or worse.
The interesting aspect of this is the contempt conservatives have for conservative institutions.Report
What’s interesting here is that the post contains no arguments whatsoever. There was just a set of facts. Munk Debates held a debate. The debate was on a particular proposition. They polled the audience before the debate on how they think about the proposition and then held the debate and polled again. The poll had the largest swing in Munk Debates history.
But how does Chip frame this?
The standard conservative complaint, embedded in this post
He sees the post that contains nothing more than a set of facts and sees a conservative complaint embedded in it.
Even his defense against MSM bias contains, at the root, an endorsement of the technique of media criticism he is decrying that others are using!
It really makes you think.Report
Would it change anything if I said “the post, and comments from the person who posted it”?
Because as the conversation developed, it turns out that the “people” who distrust the mainstream media are mostly conservative, and mostly since the election of 2016 and Donald Trump’s attacks on hostile media reports as “liberal bias”.
So yeah, the standard conservative complaint.
And again, your own contempt for conservative institutions is my point.Report
Oh, so looking at the biases demonstrated by the journalists in other contexts is an appropriate tool to reach conclusions about any given article they write?
I endorse the use of this tool as well.Report
“What’s interesting here is that the post contains no arguments whatsoever. There was just a set of facts. Munk Debates held a debate. The debate was on a particular proposition. They polled the audience before the debate on how they think about the proposition and then held the debate and polled again. The poll had the largest swing in Munk Debates history.”
Oh, don’t be silly. The simple choice to share this itself is staking a position. There is no neutrality so stop pretending/lying.Report
The simple choice to share this itself is staking a position. There is no neutrality so stop pretending/lying.
I’m 100% willing to say that the choice to run a story is staking a position.
Even that there is no neutrality.
Could a lack of trust follow enough staking of enough positions?Report
No. Staking a clear position and sticking to it engenders trust. Reporting enough facts engenders trust. “Just asking questions” after creating a post of someone else’s reporting while ducking making clear statements of position does not engender trust.Report
My clear statements of position are something to the effect of “The MSM is losing trust.”
This debate, for example, was one that I thought was interesting not only because of the debate but because of the size of the swing. On top of that, I think that the size of the swing is representative of larger problems in the MSM.
One of the big defenses of this that I’ve seen is some form of whataboutery when it comes to conservative news and, from there, denial that there is a problem at all that cannot be placed squarely upon the heads of conservatives.
And I think that the Independents do a good job of arguing against that particular defense.
So here we are. Now what?Report
Except…the MSM is still the most highly trusted news source, for both conservatives and liberals including everyone here.
No one here is willing to name a news source they trust more than one of the mainstream sources.
So, now what?
From what I can see, nothing. For the foreseeable future, all the Important People, the cool kids, including you and everyone here, will still be reading and watching MSM even if they are clucking their tongues about how bad it tastes and the portions are too small.Report
“The ship is sinking.”
“Look. Every single person you can see is standing on the deck with us!”Report
See, in order for this metaphor to work you need to tell what “sinking” means.
What happens if the New York Times stubbornly refuses to heed your advice?Report
See, in order for this metaphor to work you need to tell what “sinking” means.
In this case, I’d say it equates to “losing trust”.
What happens if the New York Times stubbornly refuses to heed your advice?
I’d look for layoffs at some point.Report
You need to stop speaking on behalf of all the site’s conservatives.Report
You need to stop playing Hall Monitor.Report
Chip, I think that anyone who refers to “mainstream media” as a singular is an abject idiot and not worth listening to.Report
I’m talking about YOU… someone who engenders absolutely zero trust.Report
And that’s fine.
Given your recent experience, can you see how someone else would have a similar experience with the MSM?Report
I am not surprised that there are a range of opinions on different news media outlets or the news media in general.Report
People will have opinions, there’s no doubt about that.
But I was asking whether your response is one that you think is going to something close to uncommon or rare.
Personally, I think that your response is exceptionally reasonable and we can expect to see it as being exceptionally common.
I was wondering if you would also see your response as exceptionally reasonable and wondering whether we can expect to see it as being exceptionally common.Report
“You’re the sort of person who is the sort of person I’ve declared untrustworthy, therefore I assume that anything you do is part of some shifty plan, and it’s your responsibility to show otherwise, not mine,” said the store owner to the black kid.Report
Do you actually have something to offer? Sorry I seem to have become a bug up your butt lately. Maybe take a brief walk and see if you can regroup and say something substantive.Report
Adjacent:
Report
I think the Post’s biggest problem in the Bezos/web subscription era is that instead of trying to develop its own voice and brand it has gone all in on pale imitation of NYT.Report
Are there any exemplars that you could suggest?
Like any media outlets that you think are reliably accurate and trustworthy?Report
I was talking more about market share and branding than accuracy. The business side if you will. So they don’t have to lay people off.
Seeing as how paper of record is already taken and with its location in DC I’d try to turn it into something like a center-left Wall Street Journal but for the governing class instead of finance/business. Not so much all the news fit to print as ‘this is what the important people read to know what is really going on.’ You’d be sacrificing a degree of national appeal but hopefully getting a very loyal subscriber base for a different kind of news source.Report
Fox and the Murdoch empire have demonstrated a pretty convincing example of how to increase market share and profitability.
In all seriousness, can you articulate reasons not to just become a Fox clone?Report
That niche is covered and there is already a right wing newspaper in DC (Washington Times).Report
WaPo does this already though. Its the daily for the DMV market which as you know includes all those important people.Report
Which is weird right?
The initial post here and subsequent comments all have this “Nobody goes there- Its too crowded” aspect to them.
“The mainstream media outlets can’t be trusted”, the story goes, “and hoo boy they better straighten up and fly right otherwise…”
And this, right here, is where the story just ends.
Like, what is going to happen if the NYT doesn’t stop doing whatever mistakes it is doing?
Will it stop being the Paper Of Record? Will all the Important People start reading the New York Post, or Epoch Times or Washington Examiner?
Of course not. Everyone laughs at those outlets, even conservatives.
What we’re seeing here is the uncool kids demanding to sit at the Cool Kids Table.
The uncool kids already have their own table, mind you, and plenty of them actually.
But they scorn those, and want the respect and admiration that comes with being a jock or cheerleader.
Without, of course, being athletic or pretty.Report
Apt analogyReport
I am not really following. You asked a specific question and I gave a good faith answer. Now you’re saying I really meant some other meta thing unrelated to the thing I actually said that may or may not be related to the politics of high school cafeterias?
Come on now. Or at least if you’re going to do that I think you should back off on accusing Jaybird of the same thing. No point in discussing if we’re going to debate what we think a poster actually meant instead of what was actually said.Report
When I was a kid, the “smart” opinion was that, of course, the big newspapers have a bit of a left bias but that’s a *CULTURAL* bias and not, you know, anything more than that. So it’ll show up in stuff like abortion and whether music should be censored but it doesn’t affect the *BIG* stories.
The WSJ was different, I was told, because investors don’t care about stuff like abortion or other cultural issues. They just want accuracy. They need to know whether they want to invest in the mines in this or that part of the world and so they don’t *CARE* about who’s right or wrong in the narrative about the war, they only care about whether the mines will be stable and whether there will be a shortage of miners.
So the stories talked about stuff that investors cared about rather than cultural fluff.
And that’s why the WSJ was coded “right” and the NYT was coded “liberal”.
All that to say… I don’t know that we could have a center-left WSJ.Report
I think it’s called Financial Times.Report
“The Editorial Board is known for its strong conservative positions which at times brings it into conflict with the Journal’s news side.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial_Board_at_The_Wall_Street_Journal
This was true when you were a kid. Who told you that they weren’t conservative? The MSM?Report
But that quote of yours shows that the news side wasn’t conservative.Report
Correct, or at least not as far right as the editorial board. But this is one of the big problems with this whole conversation. The WSJ isn’t one thing, so the MSM certainly isn’t one thing.
I’m not sure someone can say “The WSJ isn’t conservative, it’s just what investors want” when their editorial section is a forum for climate change denial.Report
Oh, of course the editorial board was conservative.
But, and here’s the point, the investors didn’t want “conservative” reporting. They wanted *ACCURATE* reporting.
An article that made them feel good in the moment but caused them to lose money was bad reporting and that’s not what they got the WSJ for.
Read the op-eds for the feels, read the reporting for the information on what to invest in.
And the reporting wasn’t “conservative”. It had a greater emphasis on accuracy than on narrative.
Or so I was told back in the 80’s.Report
Maybe not. But Chip asked so I took a swing. And I don’t know that the concept is necessarily all that far from the best version of the Ezra Klein-Matt Yglesias axis of the left. Not that vox really turned out to be what I think they wanted it to, nor am I any expert on how to sell newspaper subscriptions.
Nevertheless I think WaPo needs to think of something. They’re never going to out NYT the NYT and my read on the string of increasingly public newsroom incidents is that they may well be killing themselves by trying.Report
Adjacent like me being in Mississippi makes me adjacent to Texas.Report
Well, I’d say something like “let’s say that there is a loss of trust in the MSM among people… how would that manifest?”
One of the ways that it would seem to me that it would manifest is something like “I’m not going to pay for this paper that I no longer trust”.
And if enough people did that, the subscription base of once important newspapers would decline in measurable numbers. Resulting in, I suppose, layoffs if the numbers were great enough.
(Bezos, I understand, is the richest man in the world now that Musk has shot himself in the foot. Maybe he could engage in a vanity project like buying the Washington Post.)Report
Comical. Truly.Report
That’s not how news media works and never did.
Trust=/=Consumption.Report
My argument is not “Trust == Consumption”.
It’s more of an if->then.
If we want to make Trust == P and Consumption == Q, I’d say that my argument is more like:
~P -> ~Q
And how do we test for this? Well, I am using the Gallup poll as a proxy for trust in P.
And seeing that ~Q is manifesting.Report
No, seriously man, that’s not how it works.
Trust and consumption are entirely unrelated variables.
The person who buys the paper or clicks on the channel isn’t the customer; The business model is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, by any means necessary.
Hard news, journalism, has never done this, ever.
The heyday of print media (post WWII, pre CNN) shows that the only profitable parts of media were comics, sports, classified and celebrity gossip. Everything else just went along for the ride to add cachet and brand identity.
Woodward and Bernstein didn’t sell newspapers, Peanuts did. The Beverly Hillbillies made money, Walter Cronkite didn’t.
The two most wildly profitable media empires in the last two centuries were the Hearst and Murdoch groups, both of which have never enjoyed the level of trust the NYT and WaPo still have today.
Its entirely possible that the mainstream media, all of it, will slowly disappear. There may just not be any way to monetize actual journalism as we know it.
But trust really has nothing whatsoever to do with it.Report
While I can appreciate using the heyday of print media as the yardstick, I think that it’d also be appropriate to look at the trust numbers for that as well.
Yes, it was Classified Ads that turned red to black and Charles Schultz that moved papers but Craigslist happened in either 1996 or 2000 and 2000 also happens to be the year in which Schultz died (was it so long ago? Seems like yesterday…).
It’d probably be more fair to compare to, at least!, when we’d say the new equilibrium established itself.
When Bezos purchased the paper?
When people were declaring Bezos’s purchase a success because the paper’s troubles got turned around?
There may just not be any way to monetize actual journalism as we know it.
I kinda wish that there were a MSM that were trusted.
We could compare the Washington Post to that.
As it is, all I can do is make the argument that people will stop buying a paper that they used to buy after they stop trusting it, point to the declining trust numbers, and point to the declining subscription numbers, and say that the available evidence hasn’t falsified the hypothesis.Report
Well if its eyeballs that you think drives trust, I’d say the Post is doing just fine – more eyeballs online then the WSJ but less then CNN.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/public-relations/audience-traffic/
Granted they are down from their March 2020 high, by half – but that set of statistics takes in the beginning of the Covid shut down.
Their print circulation is about 154,000. Your call if that’s good or not in the DMV.Report
No. It’s not eyeballs that I think drives trust.
I think that distrust drives eyeballs away.
If we want to make Trust == P and Consumption == Q, I’d say that my argument is more like:
~P -> ~Q
“So you’re saying that Trust can get you more people!”
“No, I”m saying that Distrust will drive the people you have away.”
“The WaPo still has some subscribers!”
“Yes, it does. It’s a gradient and not a binary.”
“Do you have any evidence for it being a gradient and not a binary?”
“The Gallup poll.”
“… I can’t believe that you think that Trust == Eyeballs.”Report
ESPN had mass layoffs a little while back. It had nothing to do with trust and everything to do with evolving consumer habits in a new media age. Plus all these companies that made the mistake of giving away so much content for free are realizing that wasn’t a sustainable model and that change was required. They responded in different ways, some more successful than others.
Didn’t we just have folks here advising how to get around paywalls such as the NYT’s? The issue isn’t trust… it’s that people would rather get stuff for free than pay for it and there are still lots of ways to do that, which impacts revenue.
You really need to put the shoehorn down and look at what is actually happening rather than just trying to shove individual data points into a priors-driven narrative.Report
You’re right that the media market has changed. But ESPN hasn’t helped itself by being extremely progressive and alienating a lot of its natural base. It’s different from distrust, but it’s similar.Report
You know, back in 2019, we had a discussion about ESPN and their decision to change direction after putting a lot of politics into this or that show.
One of the honchos in charge of the change in direction specifically said:
There were, apparently, a bunch of people who were upset with the decision of ESPN to talk about politics instead of talking about sports.
That, of course, started conversations in the comments about how the decision to not talk about politics is, itself, a political decision and so on and so forth (go back and reread the comments! They’re fun!).
I googled “ESPN layoffs 2022” and here’s what I found (or one of the top articles, anyway).
The big name that I noticed on there was Olbermann.
Why? Because he was one of the biggest names who was opposed to just getting back and talking about sports on ESPN.
Do you trust ESPN to talk about sports?
And so I will restate my fundamental point again: “Maybe Trust won’t get you eyeballs but a lack of Trust sure as hell can lose you eyeballs.”Report
I don’t think you know what “trust” means.
Trust isn’t the same as a preference.
I trust ESPN will accurately report the scores of games. I trust their stats and schedules. So much so they are my goto for such matters most often.
They previously moved most of their best writers behind a paywall. They then — per reports of former writers — put lots of restrictions on those writers. Due to a combo of layoffs, contacts being up, and new deep-pocketed competitors emerging (e.g., The Ringer, The Athletic) most of their best writers left. I still have the premium access (it’s bundled with other stuff I really like from the parent company) but it just generally pales in comparison to what was there before and what is elsewhere now.
I have a few writers I really like (even if I don’t always “trust” as in agree with their takes) whom I read and I rely on their app and broadcasts for live sports reporting.
But I also like other writers on other sites that didn’t exist 10 years ago.
I wouldn’t classify any of that as having to do with trust but rather quality and preference. And if you can’t differentiate between all that, your analysis is really lacking.Report
Oh, I was talking about the ratings of the various shows rather than the writers for the various websites.
The mass layoffs, for example, involved the on-air talent. And when Pitaro was making his comments, I was very much under the impression that he was talking about the daily shows rather than the stuff going on at ESPN.com. (I mean, the comments are full of people talking about the ratings rather than the hits on the webpage.)
Trust isn’t the same as a preference.
True.
But a lack of Trust will result in negative pressure on preference.
And so I will restate my fundamental point again: “Maybe Trust won’t get you eyeballs but a lack of Trust sure as hell can lose you eyeballs.”
I have a few writers I really like (even if I don’t always “trust” as in agree with their takes) whom I read and I rely on their app and broadcasts for live sports reporting.
I do not, *ABSOLUTELY DO NOT*, bundle “Trust” in with “Agreeing With”.
One of the most damaging things that Trump did, in my estimation, was get people who agreed with him to not Trust him.
And, as a response to this lack of Trust, he lost a lot of people that he had.
Because Trust doesn’t necessarily get you Consumption, but a lack of Trust will definitely make you lose it.Report
One of the most damaging things that Trump did, in my estimation, was get people who agreed with him to not Trust him.
One of the most self-damaging things that Trump did was get people who agreed with him to not Trust him. One of the most damaging things that Trump reinforced was to confuse disagreement with untrustworthiness.Report
Absolutely. I should have said that instead.Report
“And so I will restate my fundamental point again: “Maybe Trust won’t get you eyeballs but a lack of Trust sure as hell can lose you eyeballs.””
Sure… a lack of trust could lose you eyeballs.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of eyeballs is due to a loss of trust.
If P, then Q does not mean If Q, then P. I mean, that is literally basic logic.
There are so many variables that impact media consumption. And this is an industry that has undergone seismic shifts over the past two decades, some so large the industry itself is still grappling with it.
But simply pointing at declining view/readership numbers and saying, “Well, it MUST be because of this ONE thing,” is facile to the point of being useless.Report
I think you have a valid point on this. The media aren’t doing well across the board, and I don’t see any newsprint model that stands a chance. ESPN was a bad example though.Report
ESPN was absolutely not a bad example. It only seems like a bad example if you focus on one small area (on-air politics) and not the entirety of the enterprise.
Their layoffs are not because of what a few people said on-air. The layoffs started years ago, touched every area of their enterprise, and are about much more than any one particular issue.Report
It was a worse example than any of the non-ideological tech and media layoffs.Report
Please… do tell why?
Because it shows that layoffs can be the result of something OTHER than a lack of trust?Report
Huh?
I’m saying that layoffs can be the result of something other than lack of trust. I’m agreeing with you.Report
Why is it a bad example?Report
Because of the fact that they have alienated some of their fans through their ideology, which parallels the complaints about mainstream media’s politicization and loss of trust. They’re not identical, but they’re similar.Report
Again, the supposed alienation of fans is a drop in the bucket compared to other forces.Report
If you live in the conservative media bubble, it’s the biggest issue in sports.Report
I don’t know how to judge that. I mean, to me, every financial decision ESPN has ever made looks FTX-level. But I know people who walked away from sports over BLM, and anyone who says that men are women doesn’t care about being trusted, maybe especially in sports.Report
“I don’t know how to judge that.”
Yes, YOU don’t. And when provided with analysis from the people who DO know how to do that, you handwave it away because it doesn’t conform with “know[ing] people who walked away from sports over BLM, and anyone who says that men are women doesn’t care about being trusted, maybe especially in sports.”Report
Man, how racist do you have to be for ESPN supporting black people protesting against police brutality to motivate you to stop doing things you really like doing?Report
It’s not racism, man. They just don’t want politics in their sports. They just want sports… like baseball… and the national anthem… and football… and military flyovers… and hockey… and players wearing camo to celebrate Veteran’s Day… and basketball… and POTUS’s throwing out first pitches…
Ya know, non-political sports stuff!Report
It isn’t “politics” unless you disagree with it.Report
I say we all just bask in the sublime synthesis of heartfelt commercials for the military industrial complex and multi millionaires putting the nation on the spot for its moral failings. What could possibly be more American?Report
I’m sorry, who posted that analysis? And what’s with the attitude?Report
Below, I posted three links looking at different layoffs for ESPN.Report
I didn’t see it down there. The first one is behind a paywall, and given that we’re discussing whether media bias was an element in the layoffs, maybe the NYT isn’t the best source anyway. The other two seem more like lists of layoffs than analysis.Report
“ ESPN is faced with a budget crisis with the walls closing in on both sides. On one side, exponentially increasing rights fees continue to increase the demand on money going out. On the other, the continued trend of cord cutting and people unsubscribing from cable/satellite channels has a negative effect on money coming in. The trouble affecting ESPN’s bottom line is certainly the most significant turbulence that has faced the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports in a good number of years.”
From the third link. I included all three because the timing shows this has been a long-term, multi-faceted issue.Report
That’s a really powerful and well-sourced…paragraph, I guess, and haven’t denied that the business model is in trouble. Neither has Jaybird, as far as I recall, although you accused him of it. But a story of declining subscribers doesn’t disprove the notion that their politics alienated people, and I don’t know how to tease the impact out of the total numbers.Report
And speaking of bad business models, The Blaze is losing Steven Crowder. The Blaze has never seemed to figure out how to make money off conservative content.Report
So… you and Jay continue to be offered evidence that your base theory — distrust is driving away eyeballs and this is evidenced by layoffs — is wrong yet you hold fast to your theories.
Got it.
Let me ask… what would cause you to change your mind?
If the answer is “Nothing” then I think we’re done here.Report
I’ve denied what you’re claiming is my base theory. I’ve said that I agree with you about the market forces. You’ve offered no evidence for your “drop in the bucket” proposal though.Report
So in articles that show layoffs happening prior to the “no politics during sports” conversations and in articles discussing layoffs that sight increased costs and decreased viewership due to broad cord cutting… none of that goes to counter the notion that politics is a prime driver of challenges ESPN is facing?
Ooooo…kay….Report
I never said prime, I said I wouldn’t know how to measure it. You said drop in the bucket.Report
What would be interesting to see is how often people actually place political opinions ahead of other concerns like convenience or price.
Like, how often do consumer boycotts actually work?
I personally think they only are effective in limited circumstances where there is some compelling issue.
In most cases, the features that caused someone to select the brand in the first place like convenience, quality, brand cachet, or price outweigh some political objection.Report
“What would be interesting to see is how often people actually place political opinions ahead of other concerns like convenience or price.”
Well, yea, there is what people say and there is what people do.
Sports on TV remains one of the most expensive commodities. Viewership rates for the NFL in particular remain high (I believe a recent Thanksgiving game set some sort of ratings record). Ticket sales continue to go up.
So while I’m sure there are some folks who gave up on the NFL because of Kaepernick or whatever… the NFL remains as popular as ever.
But facts like that can only go so deep into a bubble.
Anecdotes don’t trump data.Report
Sports fandom doesn’t originate from a place of rational thought, it springs from all sorts of emotional instincts and social pressure.
Team loyalty, and network loyalty, is closer to brand loyalty to clothes or perfume.
The factors that cause some viewers to make other choices than ESPN could possibly be politics, but that would be an unusual development, different than anything we’ve seen before.
Like, the viewers have their favorite commentators, favorite routines and gags and special in-joke kind of social banter.
We know from decades of experience in consumer boycotts, getting people to switch brands is hellishly difficult, in the absence of really powerful factors.
The religious right were infuriated with Disney whenever it would make nice with LGBTQ people but they still buy the merchandise, still see the movies, still go to the parks. Leftists have most of the major corporations, but still shop with them, even passing over free range artisanal crafted item from a commune.
So a significant shift of consumers based merely on a few mild political messages seems…hard to fathom. The cutthroat world of sports media seems a lot more reasonable an explanation.Report
One factor may be FS1 really coming into its own over the last few years with news and scoring some high profile MLB and college football games. They have a lot of soccer too, which maybe matters in some markets. Combine that with all of the power college conferences coming out with stations plus regional baseball stations, plus nbc sports, plus NBA on TNT… and well… ESPN still has MNF but it ain’t 1995 anymore. It may not even be 2015 anymore.
Now I don’t think politics ever helps in sports coverage. There is no situation where people want to see it, and journalists who say it’s relevant are thinking like journalists, not casual sports fans or the real maniacs, or really any normal human being. But the competition for eyeballs for sports, games and news and commentary, is just plain brutal. If politics matters it’s only because the margins have gotten so narrow.Report
Aren’t sports fans interested in players’ unions, or in the liability issues surrounding career-ending injuries like brain trauma? Or the racial disparities in coaching? Or even the way sports statdiums are constructed with taxpayer funds for the benefit of the elite owners?
I’m not a sports fan and never watch anything sports so I don’t know.
But if I were, it just seems weird, almost creepy in a Soviet way where certain topics are Not To Be Mentioned.
Like, when a certain player suddenly disappears due to brain injury, how do they cover it? Is there like a blurry spot in all the old photos of him?Report
I dunno that there are polls on it but generally I think the answer across the board is no. Where the answer is yes, I think it’s only yes in a contingent way. For example people may be interested in players union/ownership disputes to the extent it might result in a lockout or a strike, because that could mean no games. The TBI is a long term thing that typically only manifests itself later in life, but career ending injuries do happen and can be a topic of conversation, especially if if happens go a good player. The representation stuff may matter in a very general and aggregate way, especially if it impacts an important hire, but that’s more of a management obsession than something the average fan cares a lot about. My take on stadiums from the sports fan side is that one’s position probably depends a lot on how one feels about the team. But all tax payers are not fans and in most places it’s only a once every 30 or so year issue.
It’s less that I think there is a no go zone and more that people are there primarily to talk about feats on the field. The highlight reel plays, tight games, team rivalries, the upsets, and the emotional rollercoaster of it is why people are interested.
I can only speak for myself but I listen to sports talk radio pretty much every morning taking my son to school to get informed on upcoming games, takes on recent games, and to know what’s going around the leagues I follow (which these days for me is really just NFL and MLB). I’m not going to turn it off if once in a blue moon something vaguely political comes up but it isn’t what I’m there for.Report
And it’s not attitude. Sorry you felt triggered by me merely pointing out that you not knowing how to judge something doesn’t mean no one knows how to.Report
Paywalls are an insult to the readers’ intelligence. Seriously.
The only print media outlet that I see doing something different is Gannett. A subscription to USA Today (or any of their local papers) gives access to all the papers. Subscriber-only content means that — a real subscription wall, not a porous paywall. They seldom aggregate AP or Reuters stories, but do aggregate stories from all their locals. For example, the NYTimes and WaPo stories about the ongoing Colorado River crisis tend to be AP or Reuters. USA Today has stories from Arizona, California, and Colorado writers. The NYTimes and WaPo coverage of the Iowa caucuses story pretty much stopped with the DNC. USA Today included the DNC, but also ran a three-part long-form story from the Des Moines Register that covered the Iowa legislature and Iowa Republican Party’s perspectives as well. The WaPo’s story on the death of Mike Leach was written by a Post staff writer based in DC. USA Today’s story was written by the MSU beat reporter, with access to local sources. The Arizona Republic’s coverage of all of the Arizona election stories was better than the traditional media.
Full disclosure: I pay for a subscription to my local Gannett paper because I don’t want it to die, and started before I got access to the full Gannett content as a bonus.Report
MC,
I’m not necessarily defending paywalls or calling out anyone who uses workarounds to circumvent them. Rather, I’m pointing out that these outlets initially had content that was generally only available at a cost (you had to buy the paper… the only really ‘free’ option was to goto a library). Then they just started giving it away for free on the internet. Then they realizing this wasn’t sustainable because people who previously paid for it stopped. Then they tried to make it so you had to pay for it, which was moderately effective: some people pay for it, some people use workarounds, and some people have just gone elsewhere. Many folks feel annoyed that something they feel they got for free “suddenly” costs money. So it is really messy to look at online readership and subscription numbers — even going back a few decades — because the models kept changing and we’re not really making apples-to-apples comparisons.Report
The issue is whether an industry can “secure the gate”, that is, control who consumes your product.
A useful comparison is the music industry, which also initially had content for fee, (tapes and discs) as well as an advertiser supported service (radio) both of which were destroyed by first digital copying then internet streaming.
The difference is that the music industry appears to have found a way to monetize their product and secure the gate via streaming services.Report
You’ve constructed a logic which doesn’t even work with your own chosen examples.
Fox, as part of the MSM, has low levels of trust, but enjoys high ratings.
If you were to plot all your chosen examples of media outlets, MSM and non-MSM alike, on a graph of x=Trust and Y=Consumption, you won’t find any pattern.Report
Fox, as part of the MSM
You know, I asked myself “surely there are numbers for this!” so I googled.
Unfortunately, the question asked was:
“Please indicate how often you get your news from each of the following sources — every day, several times a week, occasionally or never. How about — Cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC?”
And they only had numbers for 2008.
So, unfortunately, I don’t have numbers from Gallup at my fingertips for that.
Also, I’d like to restate that my position is not “trust will get you consumption” but “lack of trust will lose you consumption”.Report
Your link contradicts your position.
It shows that Fox has higher distrust numbers than national newspapers.
But, national newspapers are losing viewers, while Fox is gaining them.
It shows that local newspapers enjoy a high level of trust. But of course, they are also on the verge of extinction.
But here’s the thing. You aren’t admitting your own blind spots.
You dont like liberal media, and want them to adopt a more conservative friendly position.
So you seize on a single data point about WaPo and its financial struggle to construct a universal logic, which doesn’t hold up to 5 seconds of scrutiny.
It would be a much more defensible position to simply assert, “I don’t like liberals and want liberal media to adopt my preferred positions.”Report
Are you using numbers from 2008 and comparing them to different numbers from 2022?
You aren’t admitting your own blind spots.
You dont like liberal media, and want them to adopt a more conservative friendly position.
No. That’s not it.
I’ll compare to ESPN. I don’t watch ESPN. Sometimes it was on when I was walking through a room in which someone else was watching it and so I know who Stephen Smith is.
But if I read an article talking about how ESPN was changing course and not talking about politics anymore, I’d have opinions on that EVEN THOUGH I DON’T WATCH ESPN.
And if ESPN had layoffs, I’d have opinions on those EVEN THOUGH I DON’T WATCH ESPN.
I have thoughts on how ESPN should program its shows EVEN THOUGH I DON’T WATCH ESPN and, get this, I wouldn’t watch it even if they adopted the changes that I think they should make!
Because, get this, Trust doesn’t get you eyeballs.
But I could see how someone who watched ESPN might be turned off by what ESPN was doing to the point where they’d stop watching it.
Because a lack of Trust sure as heck can lose you eyeballs.Report
You think all of ESPN’s layoffs were about politics on TV.
That is wrong. You are wrong about that. Maybe you shouldn’t trust whatever source led you to think that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/sports/espn-layoffs.htmlReport
https://awfulannouncing.com/espn/confirmed-espn-layoffs-constantly-updated.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitterReport
https://awfulannouncing.com/2015/espn-letting-go-350-employees-current-round-layoffs.html
Are you willing to reconsider your position that ESPN’s layoffs are due to a lack of trust in the company due to how they handled political discussions on air?Report
You think all of ESPN’s layoffs were about politics on TV.
I do not.
I think that all of ESPN’s layoffs were about declining viewership.
I think that declining viewership was attributed to politics by the leadership and the story I linked to in my post talked about this.
Here’s the part of the story that I quoted a couple of times:
Regardless of political affiliation!
It seems that ESPN did research that said that they found that people went to ESPN for reasons *OTHER* than politics.
And, for some reason, the numbers kept going down.
I think that if you talk to *ANY* artist, they’d tell you how freakin’ hard it is to build an audience and how FREAKIN’ EASY it is to lose it.
And so with ESPN becoming the Sports & Politics channel despite the own network’s research.Report
“I think that all of ESPN’s layoffs were about declining viewership.”
Did you see the link that talked about increasing rights fees?
Did you see where I mentioned new competitors that were drawing eyeballs away?
Ugh, I hate to keep doing this but it just seems to so often be the case: Are you this dumb? Or are you just being a dick? Either way… not worth it. If you have zero interest in actually learning anything, there is no use in trying to show you anything. Enjoy your ignorance.Report
New competitors that were drawing eyeballs away?
You mean, causing viewership to decline?
I can see “increasing rights fees” also causing layoffs too.
Especially if there were new competitors drawing eyeballs away.
The first link just mentions who is getting laid off and a page dedicated to their goodbyes. That link is dated 2017.
I am lifting this from the second:
That link is from 2015.
Did you not know that when you posted them? Do you feel that they are more relevant than the article I posted from 2019?
Let’s look at your article from 2020 as, I think, that one has the freshest info:
Ah-ha!
New and interesting information! ESPN had problems in 2020 due to there not being ANY FREAKING GAMES to talk about.
Well, yeah. That would be a damper.
I imagine that people who know that they’re not going to get sports info from ESPN would have less reason to tune in.
To deal with the trend seriously, I would say that Cable has been in decline for years now. Cord-cutting for one, fees increasing for another, and all sorts of things going on.
But in 2019, they loudly announced that they weren’t going to be talking primarily about politics anymore because, and I’ll copy and paste this again:
Now I think that there is a bunch of stuff that ESPN realized and I’ll narrow it down to two because it’s simple:
1. There are things that are outside of our control.
2. There are things that are in our control.
And they concluded that while they only had so much power to deal with the former, they could do stuff about the latter.
And if you want hints about what those things were, you can look at what they said and what they did.Report
Yes, historic data when we’re trying to identify trends should be ignored.
So… I’m going with “Willful asshole” to answer my prior question.
Later.Report
Maybe that’s the problem, the constant urge to have opinions.Report
This is an interesting comment. It begins with an admission of ignorance: you don’t watch ESPN, but you’re aware of it, and implied is that you get info (e.g., about ESPN’s political content) from others who presumably do watch ESPN (though that’s all we know about them). From this follows an admission that out of this ignorance, you’ve formed opinions about the content of ESPN’s programming, about the reasons why that content has led to decreased viewership and ultimately, workers being laid off, and ideas about how they should alter the content to, if not get the viewership back, at least stop shedding for the reasons you believe they’ve been shedding viewers.
The thing is, once you’ve admitted the first thing, you’ve effectively said that there is likely nothing interesting in anything you’re going to follow the admission with, so no one, least of all ESPN, should listen to you on the subject.
Frankly, I wish all comments began with this sort of admission. “I truly don’t know what I’m talking about. There’s absolutely no reason to read beyond this.”Report
We’d have WAY less to read around here if that were the case.Report
Well, I linked to a news article that talked about stuff.
The news article mentioned stuff like:
And given that that was coupled with James Pitaro (the President of ESPN) declaring:
And then ESPN going on to make changes to talk about politics less…
Well, I was willing to conclude that ESPN’s research did, in fact, find this.
The comments, of course, were filled with people who also don’t watch ESPN who were talking about how vitally important it was that ESPN talk about politics.
For my part, as someone who plays D&D, I find that there are analogies.
Like, if someone told me that D&D should talk about politics more, I can easily see how I would say “no, it’s just D&D”.
And so I saw with the people demanding that ESPN inject politics into their shows.
I can *EASILY* imagine someone tuning into ESPN and just wanting to watch something about the football gossip, or the baseball gossip, or the basketball gossip, or, hell, even the soccer gossip instead of Trump, Trump, Trump.
And I don’t need to be a football fan to imagine that.
And doubly not when I have a news article telling me that my intuition that people tune into ESPN to watch sports was probably correct.
Despite all of the Evangelicals in my mentions telling me that they should be talking about Pro-Life topics as well.Report
DO you know what passed for political coverage on ESPN?
Colin Kaepernick kneeling. Seriously. They didn’t do Trump. They didn’t do the GOP, they did Colin Kaepernick. An athlete. Then they had the gall, unmitigated gall, to look into racism as it impacts sports. In sports where the players are disproportionately black. And to ask the question of why lack men (in particular) did better economic ally in sports then anywhere else. THen for good measure they reported on why lesbian women were over represented vice their percentage in the population in certain women’s sports. And did bio pieces on those lesbians.
The shame of it. Using their moral agency for such nefarious purposes that so easily offended white men.Report
ESPN segments that share your politics aren’t the same thing as ESPN not having politics in their segments. “People shouldn’t mind” isn’t proof of neutrality; if anything it’s evidence of the opposite. Also, if the Munk debate was any indication, accusing someone of racism without evidence is as much of a winner as I’ve been saying it is.Report
DO you know what passed for political coverage on ESPN?
No. No I do not.
I am stuck here looking at ESPN saying:
Now while I am sympathetic to the criticism that fans, regardless of political affiliation, should have wanted to hear about politics on ESPN, I am willing to believe ESPN when they said “we did research and they don’t.”
One of the things that we got into in that original thread was Sam talking about fans wanting to be “coddled” when they tuned into ESPN.
I ask you this:
You’ve been working hard all day. You’ve had to deal with stuff at work. There’s stuff going on in the world. Some of that stuff is stressful. There’s stuff going on locally. Some of that stuff is stressful.
I appreciate that it might be immoral to want to turn on an entertainment channel and be coddled for an hour or so, but it strikes me as reasonable for an Entertainment channel to do research into what their audience wants and then say “maybe we should do that?”Report
Did you read any of the articles I offered? Articles that discussed layoffs prior to all the talk of politics on ESPN? Articles that discussed reasons for layoffs such as increased cost of broadcast rights and across-the-board cord cutting?
Did you consider that ESPN has online competitors now that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago? And that one of these was founded by the head of an ESPN side project that they cut for cost reasons and which is now owned by Spotify (The Ringer, founded by Bill Simmons after Grantland died)? Are you aware there are on-air competitors that didn’t used to exist (e.g., FS1)? Are you aware that a full-subscription model competitor now exists and has poached many of ESPN’s former writers?
Did you know any of that? Do you care about any of that? Or will you just dismiss all that because it doesn’t support your theory?Report
I will be *DELIGHTED* to look at some of these online competitors.
Let me google “the ringer”.
Okay. There’s a Johnny Knoxville movie. There’s a television show? Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar? Cancelled after one season.
Okay, it must be this one: The Ringer.
This is their homepage:
Nine Questions as NBA Trade Season Begins
NFL Mock Draft: The Texans, Colts, and Panthers Add Their QBs of the Future
The Ringer’s 101 Best L.A. Rap Songs of All Time
Week 15 NFL Picks Against the Spread
“It Was Going to Bomb”: Inside the Making of James Cameron’s ‘Aquaman’ (on ‘Entourage’)
Is There Really a Blueprint for Stopping the Dolphins? And if So, Can the Bills Use It?
The Year of the Dink
The NBA, Ranked
The NBA League Pass Value Player Rankings
The Ringer’s 2022 Fantasy Football Rankings, Week 15
The Ringer Podcast Network
The 2023 NBA Trade Value List (Pencil, Not Ink) With Joe House
Argentina-France Preview, World Cup Superlatives
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Okay. I stopped scrolling down at this point.
I did not cherry pick any of those. That was every single headline that I saw on my way scrolling down the page. Please click on the link and see for yourself that I have not skipped over any links.
You know what I don’t see among those headlines? Politics. Like, not a single one.
You know what?
I am not surprised that The Ringer is stealing eyeballs from ESPN. Not for a second.
Let’s look at FS1. Oh, FS stands for “Fox Sports”.
Here, you can look at Fox Sports too.
I scrolled down and you know what I don’t see?
That’s right.
I’m not surprised that ESPN is losing eyeballs to these guys. If what you’re looking for is “sports, sports, sports”, you’re going to find them at The Ringer and at FS1.Report
I think you’re over your skis on this one. I don’t watch ESPN either, but my general impression is that the politics comes in commentary and debate. In my youth, sports journalists loved sports and didn’t feel inferior to “real” reporters. In recent years, they’ve become editorialists, kind of the way news shows became talk/opinion shows. It’s not ESPN Presents: The History of Roe v Wade. It’s the constant race and gender, hey we’re covering meaningful stories too. So in general I don’t think you’d see many Politics stories from any sports medium.Report
And all of this reminds me of a Michael Medved anecdote I’ve told before. He was appearing on one of the network morning shows, and the guest before him was a celebrity talking about eliminating landmines. He said at that moment it occurred to him that conservatives would never win, because when they talked politics it’s called “politics” and when liberals talk politics it’s called “humanitarianism”.Report
I don’t know. I’ve never watched it.
It’s based entirely on stuff like ESPN coming out and saying:
I am willing to take it at its word for that.
Other people argue that this is an example of ESPN “coddling” its audience, that something is only “political” if you disagree with it, and so on.
So I was told to look at ESPN’s competitors and, wouldn’t you know it, I looked at ESPN’s competitors and I didn’t see something that got within 10 feet of something “political”.
I’ve linked to both pages. Check them out. See if you can see something I’ve missed.Report
I’ve said it to Kazzy, and I’ll say it to you: I can’t think of a good way of measuring this. The political agenda has an impact on sports viewership, but I don’t know how to measure it. I don’t think counting news headlines of two sites on one day would come close though.Report
I agree there’s not a good way of measuring it.
But you can do a hypothesis like “if the corporation does X, then numbers will head in a particular direction” and then see what happens if the corporation does X.
It doesn’t *PROVE* it, but we can say that the hypothesis isn’t falsified by the experiment.
Then we can look and see if there are any websites that pop up and deliberately avoid what we theorize is a mistake for the first website. And we can see if those websites become examples of successful websites.
This doesn’t *PROVE* it, but it doesn’t falsify the hypothesis either.
You want proof? I don’t have any.
You want hypotheses that haven’t been falsified? I’ve got a handful.Report
Two things: First, do the same for ESPN’s homepage (or any particular page), and it will look very similar. The “political” content was usually, like, showing players wearing BLM shirts back in 2020, or something like that. The website pretty much always looks like it does today.
That said, people clearly have absolutely no problem with politics in their sports coverage, as others have noted. Sports and sports coverage is full of military sh*t, for example. They just don’t want politics they don’t agree with in sports coverage.
So when people say, “I don’t want politics in my sports” in a survey, you have to take it with a pretty big grain of salt.
And I will admit that I say this as someone who is incredibly uncomfortable with all the military and “patriotic” sh*t that gets mixed up with sports these days. I went to a Texas Rangers game a few years ago, and it was a deeply unpleasant experience because of it. So I get it, if you’re racist, seeing black people say “black lives matter” on your sportsball broadcast really sucks, just like it sucks for anti-war/anti-imperialist folks to see machines our country uses to blow up weddings fly over a baseball game in which the teams are wearing camouflage to celebrate the military.
Also, if we’re getting into sports and politics, we should probably talk about Deadspin as well.Report
First, do the same for ESPN’s homepage (or any particular page), and it will look very similar.
For one thing, it is the current year rather than the year in which ESPN said “We’re not going to talk about politics anymore because our numbers said that people don’t like that.”
So when people say, “I don’t want politics in my sports” in a survey, you have to take it with a pretty big grain of salt.
Look at the headlines I posted and, please!, visit the websites I linked to.
I don’t see anything political *FOR REPUBLICANS* on there. Point it out to me!
So I get it, if you’re racist, seeing black people say “black lives matter” on your sportsball broadcast really sucks, just like it sucks for anti-war/anti-imperialist folks to see machines our country uses to blow up weddings fly over a baseball game in which the teams are wearing camouflage to celebrate the military.
I did see that The Ringer has an article: “The Ringer’s 101 Best L.A. Rap Songs of All Time”
Read it here.
Should I have included that in my list of “political” articles?
Perhaps it was an oversight on my part. The first entry is Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move”.
Also, if we’re getting into sports and politics, we should probably talk about Deadspin as well.
Is that an example of one that talks about politics still? I remember that the head honcho sent out an email saying “stick to sports” and then he resigned and then a bunch of old Deadspin people created the “Defector” website and I don’t know whether to consider Deadspin an example of a successful website that still talks about politics or whether it’s a shell of its former self.Report
So you don’t consider the coverage of military flyovers political? you don’t consider the elimination of discussions regarding structural racism and poverty driving young black men into sport political?
Because its all there man, if you are actually willing to look for it.Report
Wait, are you saying that every time someone doesn’t talk about racism, they’re committing an act of Republican politics?Report
I’m saying that covering military flyovers and hosting military commercials appeals to the hyper patriotic side of Republican politics. I’m saying not talking about the racism mega athlete still experience relieves Republicans of political discomfort. I’m saying that refusing to cover the pay disparities of lesbian women in professional sports gives Republican watcher and out to avoid dealing with something they find uncomfortable.Report
That’s a yes. Everything has to be covered as politics, and if it isn’t, it’s being covered as the opposing politics. But if you’re ok with what you perceive as political coverage, you should be ok with what you perceive as Republican political coverage. Unless you only accept Democratic coverage.Report
So you don’t consider the coverage of military flyovers political?
I didn’t see a link talking about the military flyovers in any of the headlines that I posted nor on the front pages of the websites that I linked to.
Again.
Point it out to me.Report
If, in 2020, at the height of the protests, you did the same thing with ESPN’s website, you probably wouldn’t see anything. Now, if you watched their coverage of the NBA bubble on TV, you would have, because it was unavoidable. The players were putting the political stuff on their uniforms! Even the Ringer would have had to address it. My point being, the politics was so minimal that even at its height, any particular snapshot of the website was unlikely to see it.
What happened at Deadspin was this: it was a sports website that did a lot of culture and politics and the intersections of those three things. They heard what you’re hearing from the right: “Keep politics out of mah sportsball!” So new management came in and told them to cut the politics. It resulted in resignations (and maybe some firings), which spiraled into mass resignations, so that Deadspin was left as a shell of itself, with no readers and no politics.
Defector is great, now, and very much like Deadspin (which was very popular!) was back when. Hopefully it can build up back to the level that Deadspin was when “no politics” ruined it.Report
I don’t know that Deadspin is really the right point of comparison. There is clearly a niche for it but I don’t think mass market sports media could adopt what they were doing and be successful. The whole structure and incestuous relationships between the leagues and the media entities are based on building a big mass appeal product.
So while there can be some successful outlets based around skewering sports, and sort of a sports news counter-culture, the whole enterprise depends on a larger mainstream that doesn’t do that. There aren’t going to be billions of dollars flowing into something that endlessly meditates on how corrupt and kind of ridiculous it is.Report
If, in 2020, at the height of the protests, you did the same thing with ESPN’s website, you probably wouldn’t see anything.
Lemme check the Wayback Machine. I googled “height of 2020 protests” and the NYT had a story on July 3rd and it talked about a large protest in Philly on June 6th.
June 7th was a Sunday so let’s look at June 8th, the last snapshot of the day.
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I checked the Cubs’ link and that one was “political” too. So that’s six stories out of eighteen.
One-third.Report
Interestingly, looking at The Ringer on that day, the first two stories are “It changes who has the power”: How Bail Funds Across the Country Are Responding to Protests and Scenes of Protest and the Demand for Sustained Change in the Nation’s CapitalReport
I love that your mic-drop moment shut down the thread. I’m in awe, even though it refuted my take. The one guy who didn’t claim detailed knowledge *looked it up* and left the rest of us wise men looking foolish. Bravo.Report
Surprising how this thread has evolved.
I guess my final thoughts are summed up this way:
Polling shows that over the past couple of decades, faith and trust in the media steadily declined generally, moreso among independents and Republicans than Democrats. Then, between 2016-2018, trust among Democrats spiked to 70% and has stayed there, trust among Republicans cratered and has stayed there, and trust among independents briefly spike and has since cratered.
The result is that only 1/3 of Americans have “a great deal or fair amount” of trust in the media, and the vast majority of those are Democrats. Everyone else has “not very much or no” trust in the media.
So the interesting question to me is “why” and what drives these numbers. Did the media suddenly change in 2016-2017 such that Democrats suddenly started trusting them a lot more and Republicans a lot less, or was the change in public/partisan perceptions? Is it a problem that perception about the media is skewed in such a nakedly partisan way?
What about the decline in media trust generally? My theory is that much of it is driven by segmentation and compromises media outlets have to take in a post-internet business environment. Fox pioneered tailoring “news” to a specific audience and still being able to make money, and many outlets have followed along. Although small in absolute terms (only about 1-2% of the population watches Fox), there are enough people who want to hear the propaganda that Fox and MSNBC sell, especially via their “opinion” shows. But their audiences are very old and are dying off.
The market conditions are such that only a few giants can exist as truly national/global outlets like the NYT and the WAPO. But much of their revenue doesn’t come from “news” but from other things. There’s a reason the NYT paid top dollar to purchase Wordle, for example – it’s a great way to bring in more subscription dollars, like the crosswords.Report
“Did the media suddenly change in 2016-2017 such that Democrats suddenly started trusting them a lot more and Republicans a lot less”?
I’d say, yes. Leaving aside all the demographic and technological shifts which play a role in media trust, the press definitely changed during that period with regard to the biggest story of the year, which they also got wrong, and it’d be hard not to draw a connection between the change and the error.Report