For as long as any of us can remember, long before Donald Trump stormed the political stage, old-time newspapers like The New York Times and the trusted faces of the Fourth Estate — the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley — held sway over the American people. If legacy media printed or broadcast it, well, then, it must be true. But is that still the case?
Conservatives were always in the minority, grousing for decades about increasingly obvious liberal bias, but doing little or nothing about it. What could they do, really? The First Amendment, which they embrace, guarantees freedom of the press. They could only complain, shame, and cry into the darkness, glumly hoping against hope that someday a candidate would surface who was willing to do the dirty work of speaking harsh, uncensored truth to media power — or bias — and make it stick.
And then along came Donald Trump. The ultimate blunt instrument.
In fact, you need not look beyond the 45th president to understand the effect his “fake news” characterization has had on the legitimacy of big corporate media. Exhibit A is CNN, arguably atop Trump’s list of targets. Once the “most trusted name in news” — as it bragged following its breakout coverage of the Gulf War more than three decades ago — it has now fallen into the ratings gutter and been forced to revamp its entire Trump-deranged news operation, dismissing the likes of Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter and demoting Don Lemon. And CNN+, with its two-week life span, quickly became a running joke.
Donald Trump (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
That is emblematic of how the elite media’s descent to the point of widespread distrust, years in the making, rapidly accelerated with its unapologetic crusade to kneecap Trump. It continued with their jaw-dropping characterization of “mostly peaceful” BLM-inspired riots that ripped the nation asunder. And then came the pandemic, when media elitists in bed with the left seemed more concerned about ripping Trump to shreds in an election year and buttressing Anthony Fauci’s command and control over a stunned and vulnerable populace than speaking to the concerns of everyday Americans.
Donald Trump and the Mass Media Misfire
But the mainstream media’s declining influence can most easily be chronicled in the continued popularity of the 45th president as he prepares his all-but-official run to win back the White House in 2024. The same powerful Trump-hating press that served as a bullhorn for the Russia collusion hoax, impeachment narratives, and the Jan. 6 show trial — and anything else that makes Trump look bad, real or imagined — have not only failed to knock him to the mat but have accomplished the opposite. They have propped him up.
Indeed, following the raid at Mar-a-Lago, Trump enjoyed a ten-point bounce in his approval, and he is now running ahead of Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, as tabulated in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. Even more important, he is leading in multiple battleground states that he lost in 2020. In a poll on the effect of the Mar-a-Lago raid, 35% of respondents said it made them less likely to vote for Trump, but 38% said it would make them more likely to pull the lever for him.
Have the media we grew up with truly lost their towering influence? Well, half a century ago, the Gallup Organization began polling press favorability, with as many as 72% of Americans expressing trust in the mass media during the 1970s. By 1997, that number dropped to 53%. And now, just 36% — half the number from 50 years ago — express trust in corporate media. And that is down four points even from 2021. Case closed.
If the press were still so influential, wouldn’t Trump be finished by now, after seven years of unbroken condemnation by the entrenched forces of the political and media establishment? Instead, the non-stop beatdown has backfired, stoking the fires burning in Trump and his supporters. This is unmistakable evidence that big media have seen their monumental presence — and trust — greatly diminished from days gone by when the man in the gray flannel suit came home from his 9-to-5 job, settled into his easy chair, read the afternoon paper, and enjoyed his martini over the CBS Evening News. Those days are long gone, but not just due to the advent of the internet and consequent rise of new and diverse voices. It is because of the increasingly prevalent view that elite media are no longer to be trusted.
