I’m not making this shit up:
Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.
The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain’s publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world’s biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc..
The good news is that no single news outlet can garner more than 11% support from Americans. The bad news is that Fox News is the most trusted news source among Americans. This is most unfortunate. A 2003 Program on International Policy (PIPA) study found that Americans were severely misinformed about basic facts related to the war in Iraq.
An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.
But, check out the difference between people that got their news from NPR versus Fox News.
You can parse that poll anyway you want. But one thing is clear. Fox News actively misinforms its viewers. And, yet, somehow the network is more truted than any other single source of news. That is a national tragedy. We have a lot of work to do.
Thye’re trusted by that 11% because they tell the people who watch it what they want to hear.
Or how about this Steven? They leave out what they don’t want to hear. My sis watches and quotes Faux news. When I refute what she has said with facts(over the phone) I can see her with her fingers in her ears singing lalalalalala so she doesn’t have to listen. Ugh!
To me the saddest part is that not one of the news outlets can get more than 11%. Shows they are really doing their jobs huh?
You are a well known contrarian… probably a lover of ragheads and definitely a commie. Every time I see your sig on BT I stick my fingers in my ears and sing lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalal dadadada lalalala dadada, until I realise that I can still see the propaganda you are pushing. 😉
It’s interesting how the headline for that first linked article implies that Fox is as trusted in the US as Al Jazeera is in Egypt, despite the enormous difference in the proportion of people who consider them the most trusted (11% vs 59%, respectively).
And what about this line?
True. It sounds like there is a good chance that more people trust blogs than any major news source, but they sure don’t make it sound that way.
Well, I know how many people in my neighborhood started reading something like AlterNet, and eventually found their way to the blogs from there. And now they rip on the MSM “coverage” of the news too.
I bet the numbers of people who trust blogs are growing faster than the numbers of those who trust MSM sources, but of course, the MSM will never report on their own incomeptence.
“Just as many people distrust them as trust them.”
Can we get a poll on this? I haven’t heard of any people who have read blogs before who distrust them. The distrust seems to come almost entirely from the media and those who don’t actually use the internet.
at least not all of them. However this has bearing on a point Canberra Boy makes, which is that to be well informed you need more than one source of news. “The Blogs” is not a source of news. Booman Tribune is seldom a source of news. Daily Kos is seldom a source of news. Unless you’re talking about one of the wonderful moments when someone on one of those blogs breaks a story, such as when Londonbear revealed the location from which Kahloogian took his pictures of Iraq, or Seattle blogger Goldy on Horsesass.com broke stories about Green party Senatorial candidate Aaron Dixon’s worthiness to be a senator, a blog is a pointer to a story and a vector for opinion. You go read the story, you read the analysis, you make up your mind based on your research. That’s how it’s supposed to work in the non-blog world, and so seldom does.
The Internet is one of the best boons to the dedicated news junkie and researcher since the invention of the public library. Things like Google News and streaming audio of newscasts from around the globe give a computer owner with an internet connection access to information that mere years ago would have been the envy of a CIA analyst.
11% is far fewer than the 30+% who still think Bush is doing a good job. I would have expected at least twice as many still on the propaganda bus. The only reason FoxNews is still number one is because there is no anti-Bush news source; CNN should have been lapping the field 5 scandals ago if their executives had any sense.
This is either a very interesting bit of data about the truthfulness of US news providers, or it is a very interesting piece of data about US news consumers. Perhaps both!?
The most depressing table in the report for me was the response to “Which network is your primary source of news?”:
One of the things which I feel stands between Australians and a descent into a US-style neo-con dictatorship is the strength of our major public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as a respected public institution. The ABC is not only respected as an accurate and independent source of information, but it is also used by a substantial proportion of the population.
I suspect Britons would say something similar about the Beeb.
I suspect Britons would say something similar about the Beeb.
I don’t listen as much as I used to, but as an American I would choose BBC Radio if someone asked me to pick which news source I trust the most. It is far better than anything we have in this country.
Even NPR?
I listen to NPR in the car when I travel, which isn’t often. If I’m at home listening to an internet feed, I prefer BBC. NPR is still good but it isn’t close to what it was 10 years ago.
PT Barnum would have loved this. So much for the so called liberal media bullshit.
A poll by Fox News says that more Fox viewers trust Fox News than any other brand of tripe.
You can fool some of the people all of the time,
All of the people some of the time, but only Faux News can fool the most people on a nightly basis.
Well even if it it is just some 11 % trusting the fox news it shows that you have a lot to do before bringing the trust back to the media. 80 % misperception from the most trusted media in the US show very little critical thinking I am afraid.
I very strongly believe that soon after the Dems retake control of our government, one of the most important actions they can take to prevent a repeat of the Bush years is this: they need to break up the media conglomerates. Seperate commerce from media. News companies, whether they be television, radio or newspapers, should not be owned by commerce conglomerates. There is an inherent conflict of interest whenever commerce owns news media – as we are currently seeing. Freedom of the Press is guaranteed by the Constitution. But commercial ownership of the press undercuts the entire concept of Freedom of the Press.
It seems absolutely incredible to liberals that the very liberal BBC and Reuters just did a survey of 10,000 people and found that Fox News is now the most trusted news source in America. This is a shocking sea change in the political landscape of America. It absolutely confounds liberals who can imagine few things more horrific, but it is actually very easy to explain. If you look at Fox’s two big prime time shows “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity and Colmes” you find that they are fair and balanced and one hour long, while the MSLM (main stream liberal media) makes no pretense of fairness and covers mostly soft news for 1/2 hour.
So what on earth does fair and balanced mean? In the case of O’Reilly it means that his most common line spoken to liberals is “where am I going wrong”. He always has expert liberal guests on who disagree with him, and then they debate. The saintly O’Reilly seems to understand that democracy is a debate, that people will trust you if are willing to acknowledge that there are two sides to every issue, you are willing to present the two sides, and then step up and debate the expert liberals on the particular about which they have expertise. You can’t be more fair and balanced than that. Additionally, he is unafraid. The liberal perverts, for example, have bullied the country into believing that only they can compassionately understand pedophilia, and know how to handle it (usually with treatment and sometimes a short stay in jail) while O’Reilly will have none of it. He wants to protect kids from rapist by throwing recidivist rapists in jail. The liberals always seem to come off as, well, dumb perverts, while O’Reilly seems to come off as a passionate human being who cares about protecting kids; not rapists.
The other Fox prime time show is “Hannity and Colmes”. Hannity is the Republican and Colmes is the Democrat who gets exactly equal time. Nothing more need to be said, except to the liberals who hate such fairness on the most visceral level because the know in their hearts it exposes their silly feelings as inadequate.
The Democrats lament the supposed consolidation of the media very loudly when what they really resent is that traditional Jeffersonian Republican views are no longer being treasonously hidden from them by the homogeneous MSLM. Democrats prefer the days when CBS’s super liberal, Walter Cronkite, was the most trusted and the most listened to newsman in the world. He supported the Communists in Vietnam and was stone cold silent to the Pol Pot genocide that quickly followed the retreat he supported so self-assuredly. The liberals loved it when he used his trust to assure the then brainwashed American electorate that Barry Goldwater was not the preferred candidate. At CBS (the so called tiffany network) their idea of fair and balanced was to let liberals speak. The Cronkite legacy was handed over to Dan Rather who, in self-assured liberal haste, was quickly fired for trying to use forged documents, on election eve no less, to bring down a sitting Republican President.
The liberals loved it when the NY Times and Washington Post, with their staffs of overwhelmingly liberal reporters, set the entire nation’s news agenda with their version of “objective” reporting. Their reporting was complimented by their editorial pages (always about 80% liberal) which told us how to interpret their already biased news stories. If ever their was an example of speaking truth to power it is Fox news. They have heroically exposed the MSLM for its complete lack of trustworthiness, if not outright treason. The saddest part of it is that you can’t say the hijacking of truth and, effectively, democracy, was done out of conscious malice when it was actually done simply because liberals are not bright enough to understand the traditional Jeffersonian views on which Republican America was framed and grew to greatness.
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