No participant in the 2016 presidential election fares well in the Pew Research Center’s post-election voter survey: the candidates, the parties, and the electorate itself all receive historically poor marks from respondents. But the most despised institution of them all is the news media, which scored lower than ever before.
To be fair, the media stooped lower than ever before. Plus:
The press was in the crosshairs of both campaigns throughout this election, with Republicans arguing that the mainstream media was systematically biased against their candidate, and Democrats insisting that the media was “normalizing” Trump, and giving too much play to Hillary Clinton’s various email and Foundation-related controversies. While voters on both sides were unusually critical of the way the press conducted itself, the anger is especially intense among Republicans, huge majorities of whom say that the media was “too tough” on Trump and “too easy” on Hillary Clinton.
Many post-election analyses have highlighted the role of right-wing media, including “fake news” propaganda sites, in allegedly influencing the election outcome. But as we noted on Friday, this phenomenon was only made possible by the broad-based decline in trust in mainstream outlets.
If you want to be trusted, it helps to be trustworthy.