Commenter “kolnai” makes some interesting points about the media and asks some interesting questions:
What I’m questioning, however, is this statistic I’ve seen Caddell and others throwing around stating that only 8% of the public has a favorable view of the media…
…[E]veryone has their social “oomph” for saying they dislike the media.
But we then have to square that with the findings of people like Tim Groseclose (and what we know to be true from simple observation), that a significant chunk of people are swayed to the left by the major media outlets and their framing of the issues. E.g., if NBC, ABC, CBS, the big newspapers and magazines, etc., treat Benghazi like a nothing-burger, a lot of people will swallow it.
That is important to note. They will not be neutral. They will not say, “Hmmm”¦ this is the media I supposedly hate, so let me be skeptical here.” They will swallow it. This must be explained, and it can’t be traced to mere rational ignorance, for, as noted, the logical attitude to take then is skepticism or neutrality until one does one’s own research.
My point is that people swallow it because many, perhaps most, who claim to “hate the media” actually don’t. Democrats love it and get all their info. from the MSM. Independents, or a good deal of them anyway, just swallow what’s fed to them from the surrounding informational aether, so long as it’s spoken in dulcet tones and doesn’t broadcast it’s partisanship.
Only conservatives (and libertarians) truly loathe the media and approach every story with a critical, doubting eye.
Good points. The same polls that ask people whether they trust the media seem to be rather silent on the more important follow-up questions they might ask as to why. Maybe people don’t like the MSM because of too much coverage of the Kardashian family. Maybe they don’t like it because of not enough coverage of the Kardashian family. So we don’t know what so many people don’t like about the MSM, although we pretty much know what conservatives don’t like about the MSM.
But I would submit that the media influences even people who say they don’t like it because propaganda works for a lot of people, in much the way advertising does. One of the most basic principles of advertising is that you don’t have to like an ad—in fact, you can find it quite annoying—for it to work.
There’s still another reason why so many people remain susceptible to the MSM’s propaganda despite not having a favorable view of the press: in order to reject the MSM “narrative” it helps to have a competing one. Yes, a competing one is offered by the press on the right, but most people who are not already at least somewhat to the right don’t ordinarily read or listen to the press on the right. That makes it pretty hard to hear the other side, doesn’t it? One has to seek it out, and if (for example) Fox News has been labeled a lying and biased network by the mainstream MSM, it’s something a person won’t be seeking out unless he/she is exceptionally curious. The more common reaction is probably to listen to the news less, which means that the person is even less likely to hear the right’s version, not more.
It may seem odd to us here, but I’m pretty sure that most liberals and moderates I know (not all, but most) haven’t even heard of the Weekly Standard or Commentary, much less read them. And the liberals I know who have heard of those sources never read them, either.
Take the Benghazi story. I am relatively certain that if I were to poll my friends, the majority of them would be unaware of it at this point, except in some very general way (for example, that the ambassador was murdered, that there was a video, and that something was said in the debate about all this and Candy Crowley pronounced Obama correct). After all, where would they have heard about the rest? Not on NPR, not in the Globe nor in the Times. And if I were to email them the recent Fox News stories on it, they’d most likely say, “Well, it’s Fox, so how do I know it’s true? And why isn’t anyone else reporting on it?”
And yet those very same people might respond to a poll about the MSM by saying they don’t trust it, reflecting a certain general leeriness about it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not highly susceptible to its influence, particularly on the things it chooses to cover versus what it chooses to ignore. If a Benghazi story falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?
