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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Maybe it's the accent. When it comes to news, in a world where "fake news" has become an ideological battle cry rather than an oxymoron, Americans deem British media outlets more trustworthy than their U.S. counterparts.
The most trusted news source in the U.S. is the Economist — a venerable weekly magazine published in the U.K. — according, at least, to a recent survey conducted by the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.
The second most reliable news source, in the view of voluntary survey respondents, is public television (with the Public Broadcasting Service separately ranking sixth among survey respondents), followed by Reuters and BBC. National Public Radio placed just ahead of PBS at No. 5, while the U.K.'s the Guardian clinched the seventh spot. The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News rounded out the 10 most trusted brands. The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp. NWS, +0.49% NWSA, +0.65% , the parent of MarketWatch.
At the other extreme, Occupy Democrats — a political website with a self-professed agenda of counterbalancing the right-wing Tea Party — took the dubious honor of most untrustworthy.
BuzzFeed, Breitbart and Infowars also scored dismally on the trust-o-meter, with a BuzzFeed representative questioning the poll's merit and methods. "This is not a poll of how much trust Americans have in their news outlets. It's an open-ended, methodologically flawed survey of people who happen to fill out a form on the homepage of their local news outlet," said Matt Mittenthal, spokesman for BuzzFeed News. "No one familiar with how polling works would consider this to be reliable or scientific."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NateMich on Monday May 06 2019, @12:37AM (10 children)
It's hard to really say that I "trust" any of them. Even of those listed, I know ahead of time what their political leanings are. When you listen to / read their news stories those leanings come right through loud and clear.
So I guess I trust them to behave the way I already expect them to.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @01:28AM (1 child)
Once you realize they are not news but a way to advertise to you. You realize they can be bought. At that point they have low to no integrity as the only responsibility is to the ones paying the bills.
Most people do not use these things to get 'news' but to affirm what they already believe. You pick your flavor and that one tells you how amazeballs your party is and how smart you are to listen to them and how the other party is scum. They play to their audience.
When CNN went 24/7 live in the early 80s everyone was like 'what the hell are they going to report on'. Well turns out that this sort of station just has basically non stop political opinions disguised as facts. Apparently that sells really well. Where I work I am subjected to MSNBC which touts itself as a financial channel. The commercials are little more than scamy stuff (200 dollar foam pillows and silver coins). The advice is usually terrible. The pundants have no clue what really makes the market work (yet pretend they do). Yet people treat this as if they have something of substance to talk about. They dont, none of them do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 06 2019, @04:33PM
Yes, but CNN also had Headline News (now HLN), which used to do nothing but produce a half hour news report and broadcast that 24/7, slight feature changes over a 2 hour cycle and the lead anchors changing up and different main stories every (4? 6?) hours. That was impressive journalism. Then in the 90s they started saving money (straight recycling anchors rather than live anchor reporting) and in the 2000s caved to the consumerism demographics.
But it was grand while it lasted - it was incredible and grand to be able to get a "live" half-hour news program whenever you wanted to turn it on. And the best proof I've found that one can have journalism independent from entertainment.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by black6host on Monday May 06 2019, @03:04AM (5 children)
I don't trust any of them either. I see political slants in most sites I read. For me, the trick is to read multiple outlets. From all over the world from Times of India, Washington Post, Guardian, Aljazerra, BBC, NPR, etc., etc. No particular order, just check out a bunch of sites. Think about what you've read, look at the likely bias and *try* to make some sense of it. Most are biased, figure it out. With so many talking heads you can't focus on one place... Think!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday May 06 2019, @04:31AM
The problem is there's a high noise level, and normally the signal takes too much effort to delouse. But if they're saying something you actually NEED to have an opinion on, it could be worth that much effort. Perhaps. But even after all that work it would still be a mistake to really trust the answer you get, because the noise level is higher than the signal level. True, each piece of the noise has a bias that you can TRY to allow for, but even so...
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(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Monday May 06 2019, @06:00AM (3 children)
Ugh, I have a friend who's like that too, so she goes out looking for sites with counterbalancing coverage because of the mainstream media's bias. Which, given that she's into loony conspiracy theories, are invariably the craziest collections of tinfoil-hat nuttery you can find. In other words she seeks out sites and sources that support her conspiracy theories, because everyone knows the mainstream media is biased and can't be trusted.
Having said that, I agree with your comment "Think!". And not "think about what secret agenda the writer has", which just leads to conspiracy-theory insanity, but "think about whether what's being said is plausible, and if not, look for evidence for or against from other sources".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @09:07PM
Isn't this usually "code" for talking about yourself. 'My "friend" has this problem...'
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @09:52PM (1 child)
I think your friend's problem is that while she accurately recognizes that the mainstream media is biased and generally awful, she does not recognize that the conspiracy peddlers are even worse. So, it's just a lack of critical thinking skills, or critical thinking skills not being applied consistently.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:31AM
There's a bit more to it than that, she's from a country that's torn by racial violence and is close to civil war but feels that the world media is ignoring the brewing catastrophe there, so she goes to conspiracy-theory sites who cover it indirectly by publishing batshit-crazy racist crap. And then alongside that they also publish a pile of equally crazy nonsense which she picks up as collateral damage. I think it may be some type of reaction to trauma, but then I'm not a psychologist, just guessing around here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday May 06 2019, @03:26AM (1 child)
Yeah. What caught my eye immediately was the fact that they ranked them, rather than give an actual score. Maybe the #1 ranked news organization, the Economist, scored only 3%.
One thing I do trust is their greed. They won't play hardball with advertisers. And as I've said before, they are all much more strongly biased towards drama than left or right.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 06 2019, @04:36AM
Well, people in the US trust the Economist more, because it's more evenly biased about the US. (Granted "more" is a comparative term.) Also, not all that many people actually read their articles, and it's easier to trust a source if you don't look at it carefully.
Depending on the subject matter, I'd trust the Economist perhaps twice as much as the US source I consider most trustworthy. But if it's about things affecting Britain, that drops considerably. (Even so, they've got a philosophical bias that you need to allow for, but since you aren't their target audience, their twists won't be aimed at you.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.