A typical Alex Jones Infowars daily broadcast may get 2 million listeners. Joe Rogan’s podcast often receives 12 million viewers or listeners. Dan Bongino’s radio show gets some 8.5 million listeners daily. Even ‘B-list’ independent personalities such as Steven Crowder regularly have hundreds of thousands of daily viewers.
But “mainstream” news (ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.)–which have uniformly been promoting ever-bigger government for years–is losing market share by the month. Fewer viewers are interested in hearing obvious pro-government propaganda.
As ‘mainstream’ ‘journalism’ has been increasingly taken over by advocates of expansive, intrusive governments (i.e., Democrats), the public regards journalism with ever-greater distrust.
There appears to be a direct, strong correlation between the % of reporters who are Democrats and readers’ trust in journalism. With each decade, Democrats have increased their control over American news media. And with each decade, Americans’ trust in news media has declined.
Americans now trust news media less than ANY OTHER INSTITUTION. They trust it even less than Congress. A very large percentage of Americans–millions of news readers–now believe that whatever the news media tells them must be false.
A survey has found that only 3.4% of American journalists identify as Republican, compared to 36.4% who identify as Democrat and 51.7% as Independent. The survey also indicated a steep decline in the number of Republican journalists over the last several decades, which has coincided with record high levels of Americans saying they do not trust the media.
The Syracuse University study was first conducted in 1971 and was repeated roughly every 10 years thereafter. The first survey found that 25.7% of journalists said they were Republican. In 1982, the number plunged to 18.8%, and in 1992 it further fell to 16.4%. In 2002, the number of Republican journalists increased slightly to 18%. But by 2013, the number nosedived to 7.1%, and even this low number was cut in half by 2022 at 3.4%.
Last October, Gallup found that a record high 39% of Americans say they have no trust in the media. A few months prior, a Rasmussen Reports poll found that 58% of voters think that “bias in the news media is getting worse,” with only 13% saying the issue is “getting better.” The poll also found a stark difference between the views of Republicans and Democrats, with 68% of GOP voters saying that bias is worsening, while only 42% of Democrats saying the same.
The American public’s trust of the media has in fact reached such a low level that at least half say that national news organizations are intentionally attempting to mislead, according to a Gallup/Knight Foundation poll released last February.