From an article in the superb website, Issues & Insights looking at how public trust in the MSM continues to crumble, using not a one-off poll but the I&I/TIPP survey which asks two questions about this trust every month. One question is about the traditional US MSM like the NYT, WaPo, and the big three TV broadcasters, and the other is about the so-called alternative MSM – the “B-grade” that the traditionals’ look down on, like the The New York Post, The Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, and Real Clear Politics.

Unfortunately the latter group fare even worse, with their figure at 67% distrust.

In both cases the figures would be even lower were it not for Democrat voters who still (barely) believe – which just means that they like what they’re fed, which the accusation they fling at right-wing up-and-comer sites like RedState and PJMedia, as well as those dreaded Social Media algorithms. But fear not Lefties, Google is doing its best to strangle them in their cots (109 PJMedia articles demonetised) and tilt the playing field.

The I&I article asks the obvious question of whether this can be turned around and concludes that it’s “not likely”, which I think is an understatement when you see crap like this continuing at even the smaller MSM sources.

You could say that the journalist/s concerned were both brain-dead on mathematics and unable to ask questions, but it’s more likely a direct result of The Narrative approach to modern journalism, where they decide what the story will be about (in this case DeSantis bad and incompetent, “Undocumented Immigrants” Illegal Aliens good) and then just make up shit to support that while ignoring contradicting evidence.

As the American Council on Science and Health recently opined, “Reporters like to portray themselves as truth tellers who hold the powerful accountable. In reality, many of them are hired guns who publish propaganda under the guise of doing journalism.” 

Exactly. They especially don’t want to look deep into themselves or their MSM organisations and ask hard questions in that space, which is the real reason why they’re doomed.

There’s also the desperation of click-bait for the declining advertising revenue, where it doesn’t matter how crap your reporting is, as long as you got eyeballs on the page. Trust? Pfft!

Since 1990, according to Pew Research data, daily circulation of newspapers has plunged from roughly 63 million to just over 20 million in 2022. Digital circulation, however, is flat, with the grand exception of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Perhaps more importantly, as of 2022, total circulation and ad revenues stood at roughly $21.4 billion, down sharply from $59.8 billion as recently as 2006. So the news business contracted by two-thirds in just 16 years.

All of the above was also captured the other day in a lengthy counter-attack on the New York Times by none other than another journalist, and a fairly well-known one, the editor of RealClearPolitics. He’d waited three years to unload on them for trying to smear RCP over their coverage of the 2020 election aftermath, the NYT narrative being that RCP had gone Trump, the biggest smear anybody can apply to a news outlet: ““A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It.”

The RCP editor, one Carl M. Cannon, summarises the hit job:

The Times’ story asserted that during the period of counting absentee and late-arriving mail-in ballots, RCP took three days longer than other news organizations to call Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. It noted disapprovingly that we aggregated stories from other news outlets quoting Trump supporters who questioned the election results. It suggested that the RCP Poll Averages were manipulated to be favorable to Donald Trump. Peters focused on RCP staff layoffs in September 2017, and claimed we’d hired partisan Republicans to replace them. He reported that the RealClear Foundation, a nonprofit that supports our journalism, receives contributions from conservative donors. He also called into question a RealClear Investigations exposé naming the whistleblower whose complaints led to Trump’s first impeachment.

He lays out his resume:

In the 1980s, the Times credited my groundbreaking coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. In the 1990s, Howell Raines tried to hire me. Three books I’ve co-authored have been positively reviewed by the Times. When I covered the White House for National Journal, the Times’ book editor asked me to review a book about Dick Cheney. I have had friends at that newspaper. Although I’m not famous, I’m not unknown in Washington journalism. What I’m best known for is being relentlessly nonpartisan. If someone is writing about bias at my organization, calling me would have been the obvious place to start.

And then he lets the bastards have it, with all six barrels of a mini-gun, on each those issues:

  • Rightward turn and post-election coverage:
    The simple fact is that the amount of liberal material published in RCP every week dwarfs the annual conservative content in the New York Times. This is a newspaper where columnist Bari Weiss was bullied into resigning and editorial page editor James Bennet was fired in response to demands from leftist activists on the paper’s staff. It’s happened to others at that paper, too. The Times’ criticism of RCP, in other words, seems to be a classic case of psychological projection. We tolerate diverse voices where I work. We encourage it. It’s our business model and our belief system.
  • Refusing to calling the Pennsylvania result for three days – thereby helping Trump:
    Our own columnist, A.B. Stoddard, wrote a Thursday, Nov. 5 piece posted on RCP’s front page with the title “No, Democrats Are Not Trying to ‘Steal’ the Vote.” RCP didn’t provide any “welcome news” to the “stop the steal” crowd. Trump and his lieutenants were plotting how to challenge any adverse results well before Election Day and they stuck to their plan. We simply covered the election and its aftermath.
  • Polling (The NYT accused RCP of publishing polls and poll averages that favoured Trump)
    As you can see from the chart below, in five of the seven battleground states in 2020, the Times was off by more than four points in Biden’s favor. By contrast, the error in the RCP Poll Average in those seven states was only 1.47 points – and the only reason it was that high was because the polls in Wisconsin were terribly off, including a final one by Washington Post/ABC News showing Biden leading by 17 points and one by the New York Times itself showing Biden with an 11-point lead.
  • Layoffs where replacements came from the right-wing
    But what was really devastating in 2017 was the collapse of programmatic ad revenue driven by Big Tech, principally Google and Facebook. [de-monetising again]… There is an obvious double standard at play here. The number of reporters in Washington who are either former Democratic Party operatives and/or married to Democratic administration officials is too numerous to count.
  • Donars and Investors
    Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim saving the NYT v two college graduates starting RCP and donations from (gasp) right-wing as well as left-wing sources.
  • Whistleblowers and the 1st Amendment
    My view is that the well-organized efforts by the FBI and people like Adam Schiff to pressure Twitter to censor journalists violates both the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment – and that the New York Times, of all institutions, ought to know better.

Suffice it to say that the compare-and-contrast method works well here by showing that in every one of those claims the NYT is guilty as charged of their own accusations, except that they all bent left and were far worse in the bending than what they accuse RCP of.

I submit to a candid world that it was the New York Times that adapted to the upheaval of the era by “raging” against those with whom they disagree. Facing the dreaded specter of a Trump presidency and caught in the maelstrom of a precarious business environment, the Times and many in the legacy media embraced a highly subjective, even partisan, approach to covering the news. This was the real “evolution” that took place, and it represented a radical departure from the values and traditional customs of modern American journalism.

By contrast, RealClearPolitics covered the duly elected president of the United States – chosen by the American people in a system that has lasted for more than two centuries – as we have covered other politicians and policy issues left, right, and center.

We didn’t veer one way or the other. We stayed the course.

The NYT is nothing but a bunch of Democrat Party operatives with bylines.