In its biennial report on how Americans view the national media the Knight Foundation found that “many Americans feel the media’s critical role of informing and holding those in power accountable is compromised by increasing bias. As such, Americans have not only lost confidence in the ideal of an objective media, they believe news organizations actively support the [current] partisan political divide.”
An astonishing 86 percent of the 20,000 American citizens the group polled see either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of political bias in the news coverage they receive. Further, the group found that citizens say that a lot of it is “intentional”, accusing some in the media of simply making up the facts necessary to promote a preordained agenda:
Americans perceive inaccurate news to be intentional — either because the reporter is misrepresenting the facts (54%) or making them up entirely (28%).
Nearly 8 in 10 Americans (79%) say news organizations they distrust are trying to persuade people to adopt a certain viewpoint, while 12% say they are trying to report the news accurately and fairly but are unable to do so.
In addition the group learned that nearly half of those polled think the media bears “a great deal” of blame for the country’s currently highly polarized political climate.
From his viewpoint atop the Department of Justice Attorney General William Barr has a unique perspective on how the media is handling its coverage of the riots. In an exclusive interview with Townhall he confirmed the Knight Foundation’s findings.
He minced no words:
They’re basically a collection of liars. Most of the mainstream media. They’re a collection of liars and they know exactly what they’re doing.
A perfect example of that were the riots. Right on the street it was clear as day what was going on, anyone observing it, reporters observing it, it could not have escaped their attention that this was orchestrated violence by a hardened group of street fighting radicals….
They kept on excluding from their coverage all the video of this and reporting otherwise and they were doing that for partisan reasons….
They were lying to the American people. It wasn’t until they were caught red-handed after essentially weeks of this lie that they even started feeling less timid.
The press has dropped, in my view – and I’m talking about the national mainstream media – has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity and are political actors, highly partisan who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose and support a political narrative that has nothing to do with the truth. They’re very mendacious about it.
Barr doesn’t write off the entire national media:
I think there are a handful of reporters in the mainstream media that still have journalistic integrity, and there are some, but the overwhelming majority doesn’t have it anymore.
But they are in the distinct minority:
The people … have essentially adopted the same methods and ploys as … the national media and that is … because of their own orientation and also what their editors say … they’re not really interested so much in what really happened but in pursuing a preformed narrative that suits some kind of ideological agenda. That’s what it’s all become.
The Knight Foundation quizzed 20,000 Americans. Barr has access to the entire U.S. intelligence network. His views, if possible, carry even more weight than the foundation’s.
As the credibility of the national mainstream news media continues to decline serious readers are looking elsewhere for their news. And that is driving an entire cottage industry serving citizens seeking alternative news sources they can rely on. For instance there’s Adam Rosszay’s “Top 10 Alternative Media List.” And there’s the “Top 20 Conservative News Sites to Read in 2020”, put together by the staff at Liberty Nation which wisely includes The New American among its picks.
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
