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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @12:46AM (3 children)
Had been an subscriber to the Economists for decades, but then I've got to travel to other parts of the world, and then the Internet happened, where folks from the region talked back to the Economists writers that they are full of shit.
I am sure this is true of most other big-name media (NYT, NPR, WSJ, AP, Reuters, etc.), but specifically about the Economists, they hire "young bright things" from Oxbridge/LSE/U of London, send them off to places they have no clue about, get them send reports like they know what they are talking about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @02:59AM
I hear you on the Economist. They write up the conventional point of view in a way that gives the impression of being insightful. They've definitely hired the cream of the BS-artist crop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @06:13AM
Incompetence or malice? Intelligence agencies would love such a system if they could control it.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 06 2019, @07:24PM
When the Economist was a purely British publication, their take was unapologetically in support of neo-liberal economics, personified by Milton Friedman. They argued consistently for abolishing tariffs and liberalising international trade and finance. Basically, they championed the project of globalization. They did not care about touchy-feely discussions about whether that was good for everybody. They scoffed at the impact on the environment. They cared not at all for non-Western cultures.
I always felt ambivalent about their project, but admired their pluck in its defense.
Then sometime in the early 90's they hired an American to run the magazine, and it morphed into the monster than gave us the Iraq War and WMDs, and which tried very, very hard to give us the Trans-Pacific Partnership to break the back of the West's resolve once and for all.
For a time Stratfor, an online magazine, took up the torch and they carried it high. But when I got my own personal window into the heart of the Beast that is the global government, I lost the taste for that too. Dunno where they're at now.
Washington DC delenda est.