Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low

I think it boils down to two key factors:

1. If news doesn't support a person's narrative, than individuals don't trust it.
2. News is increasingly transitioning away from reporting and moving more into opinion because it is the opinion that drives revenue. The lack of clarity blurs the lines for the general public.

The narratives on both sides of the spectrum are becoming more and more bizarre, although I think Majorie Taylor hit a low point when she started spouting that the hurricanes were being created by the government and used to target Red states.

...am I correct in thinking I remember some people suggesting that Preside George W. Bush was responsible for the hurricane (Katrina?) that devastated New Orleans?

>>1. If news doesn’t support a person’s narrative, than individuals don’t trust it. 2. News is increasingly transitioning away from reporting and moving more into opinion because it is the opinion that drives revenue. The lack of clarity blurs the lines for the general public.<<

I think your #2 is close to spot on. “News” sources aren’t really giving us news.

I don’t really agree with your #1. True news has nothing to do with what I believe or don’t believe. It simply is. Opinions that don’t support my views are something I won’t trust, agreed, but opinions are not news.

What I have trouble accepting is ostensible news from untrustworthy sources. If someone lies to me and then says “I represent science,” I’m going to have trouble accepting what they say afterwards. Not because of the actual truth of what they say, but because I no longer trust the source. I trusted the CDC much more before they bent their recommendations to match what the NEA wanted. They destroyed their own credibility with me and it had nothing to do with my “narrative” and everything to do with betraying the truth for political expediency.

The main “news” sources in the U.S. jumped the shark long before the CDC joined them.

Dave,

You kind of reinforced my #2. The CDC has been around for 78 years. During a very political crisis (COVID) - and yes it was very political during the 1918 flu, misinformation abounded. All over the place, including the CDC. As a result, you appear not to trust the CDC, because of the misinformation of COVID, not because the CDC wholesale only generates misinformation in its 78 year history. And therefore you play into your narrative.

Your #2 I already mostly agreed with. #1, on the other hand, states individuals don’t trust news that they disagree with. I don’t distrust news I don’t agree with. Facts are facts, whether I like them or not or agree with them or not. I distrust sources that change the actual facts for whatever is expedient. If I can’t trust organizations that supposedly are using science to come to give them their data to actually give me the facts, then like with most things I hear, I have to evaluate several sources to see if the facts really are indeed facts. I might still come to a wrong conclusion, but not because of a single source that misdirects me.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t so skeptical about Covid until after Fauci admitted lying to us, and after the CDC changed their recommendations because they got pushback from telling the truth. Silly me for thinking our national science organizations would publish data, not political pablum. I guess I was a little naïve.

As to the CDC in general, I’m not familiar with their long history. They might have put out disinformation for their whole existence. I guess I missed that. I’m neither a historian nor a biologist, and my degrees and experience are in other fields. I tended to believe most of what they published when I read it (again, silly me). The most recent incident with them may have just been the latest in a long train of falsehoods and disinformation, but it was both obvious and jarring enough to change my views of them.

Dave,

That is what I meant #1. Whether Fauci lied or not, is a whole other matter as there is finger pointing all around. But regardless, you have taken the approach that you felt someone lied to you, therefore everything must be untrustworthy from this source. Your narrative is, "this source lies and cannot be trusted" and it is based on a few scenarios. You are not looking at what is being told is truthful or not. You are holding to the narrative that because your experience has shown that they lied in one situation, this source can no longer be trusted. I remember seeing you extend this to science in general on another thread, but I can't recall conclusively. Your trust in the outlet is not whether truth is or isn't being told, it is your feeling that they can't be trusted because you and possibly others observed them at some point saying something untruthful. And you have spread that across great swaths, CDC, NIH, WHO, Fauci, scientists....... And so yes, most likely the more spread this across more and more groups because of a more isolated experience, the more you are coloring this and more it feeds into news can't be trusted.

Have you ever heard the maxim “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!”? I pretty much operate by that.

When sources have been shown to lie at least once, it’s not “narrative” that they cannot be trusted. It’s by definition. How much they cannot be trusted is a different question, but since it’s not 100%, then what they say must be corroborated by other sources. I do look at the truthfulness of what is being said, but I don’t trust that it’s true if it only comes from the untrustworthy source. It must be established by multiple sources at that point. (And further, I can mostly then listen only to the other sources, since the original one has proven it can’t stand on its own.) Loss in credibility isn’t permanent, but it’s a long process for someone or an organization to reestablish its credibility once they have abused and lost it.

You are incorrect that I extend this to science generally. I believe in science itself, but I do distrust supposed “scientific” conclusions put forth by those who show they subjugate the facts in service to other interests. When someone says “I represent science,” they completely misunderstand (or are intentionally misleading) what science is about and how it works. To this day I still don’t know whether Pons and Fleischman were lying about their cold fusion results, or only overly optimistic about what they saw. However, their results could not be repeated or verified by other scientists. The scientific process showed their theory was wrong. Science doesn’t work by saying “there’s a consensus” and then shouting down others who present evidence to the contrary. All evidence has to be evaluated for science to do its job.

For the government to call multiple respected scientists “conspiracy theorists” because they didn’t go along with the official “consensus”, without listening to what evidence they presented, is an abuse of science not actual science. And yes, I do distrust sources that abuse science.

You want to make this all about narrative, when it’s really about what is true. All observers are subjective, myself and you included. That’s why there needs to be a number of them much greater than one. However, the truth most assuredly does not depend on trust in a single source (God excepted), official or otherwise.

dgszweda, Do you think science is a process where evidence is tested and examined, or do you think science is the consensus of people who have academic credentials that are currently supported by the government, media, top universities, and journals? Further would you put the same level of support in the government if a different political influence were affecting the government scientists? (think Anthony Fauci vs Scott Atlas). I ask the same question to dcbii because I am curious if you would both answer the same way.

Science is a process where evidence is collected and tested and results are peer reviewed and a consensus is achieved. Sometimes it is more theoretical and sometimes it is more factual, but it all should be testable.

I am not necessarily putting a support for one side or the other. I am trying to balance it out a bit. People didn't like what, let's say the CDC during COVID, were saying. They sought out sources to support their view, and then they basically painted the entire target as false and couldn't be trusted. I try to put support where truth is.

Science is a process where evidence is collected and tested and results are peer reviewed and a consensus is achieved.

So, if it were not peer reviewed, would it still be science? What about the works of Louis Pasture, Thomas Edison, and George Washington Carver? Were they not scientists until their work was peer reviewed? Further who is allowed to do the peer review. Many of Fauci's peers were reviewing his conclusions and were disagreeing and then they were accused of being anti science. During covid, consensus was reached among people who agreed with each other, but consensus was not reached among scientists.

As a former scientist, yes, peer review is a critical part of the scientific method. Yes Thomas Edison and others can be scientists, but their ideas need to be peer reviewed and a consensus needs to be reached. A majority consensus should be reached. If not, then it is articulated as an idea that may have broad consensus or no consensus. Peer reviewed ensures that something has been tested again and again and shown to be trustworthy.

COVID was less about science and more about a bunch of political maneuvering. Also it was fast acting without always time for long term broad testing. Which was a symptom of its very nature. The same political maneuvering was being made during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak. Some of it is people not wanting to be told what to do, and being suspect of the government, especially if it is not a political party they are aligned to. That then spouts all kinds of trails.

This was a fast acting virus, that was killing thousands of people a day growing rapidly and it was a public health emergency. One that was not fully understand and that was rapidly evolving. That is typically not very good for trying to reach broad consensus, peer review and rigorous testing. Despite Fauci being in the public health sector for most of his life with a long storied career across both policitical parties and with a solid reputation, people want to paint him as a fraud, liar, failure….. And that is their right, but to be honest, he was in an unwillable situation, trying to navigate through multiple political parties and their disparate priorities, and the internet where any Tom, Dick and Harry can publish what they want. You had people claiming horse medicine was the cure and people eating their fish chemicals and dying because someone with an MD was telling them to.

The focus was to save lives using the best evidence they had (that was changing rapidly), applying the best science at the time (which was not always accurate for this specific scenario) and creating recommendations to save lives. Much like doctors do every day in trauma units. Some people live, some die, sometimes doctors make the right decisions and sometimes they don’t. All trying to balance it with the best information they had, conflicting hospital policies and a situation with the patient that is changing rapidly. Doctors in the trauma units do not have time to test every scenario, get consensus before they react. They have to make judgement calls using the best evidence and the amount of time they are given to make calls.

I am not defending everything Fauci did. And I know mistakes were made. But given the situation and the fact that we are flawed human beings, it was bound to happen. If you go to a hospital, I will guarantee you will find mistake every day taking place. Does that the mean medicine is bad? The hospital can’t be trusted? Not necessarily. It could mean that what they are practicing could be considered bad and it could mean that the hospital can’t be trusted, but it would be naive to just distrust it all without better understanding it all.

Fauci got some stuff right and some stuff wrong. I would argue he got more right than wrong. Pandemics like this come up once every 100 years, so it is most likely that no one would have gotten everything right. With the internet, you had everyone throwing out every idea possible and everyone attacking everything every agency did. After the fact, we are now operating with hindsight bias. Was Fauci going to make a mistake? Yes. He is human and global pandemics are not well understood. After the fact we are able (with knowledge that we may not have fully had at the time of the incident) able to evaluate his decisions and decide which ones ultimately were wrong. We are able then to look at the internet and find people who may have gotten it right. Did they get it right because of rigorous testing and peer review? No infact, practically everyone else got it wrong. Hundreds of thousands of people were spouting out ideas and such. And threw that a few got it right. Sometimes by accident, sometimes because they evaluated different studies and put different weight on their conclusions and sometimes they may have had better training. So again in hindsight we are able to look at all the noise and find a few people that may have made a better decision than Fauci. But in the end that isn't science. It is just hindsight bias against hundreds of thousands of other opinions.

>>trying to navigate through multiple political parties and their disparate priorities, and the internet where any Tom, Dick and Harry can publish what they want.<<

Emphasis above mine.

But you see, that wasn’t his job. As someone who represented the NIH and other once-respected organizations he had been part of for his “long storied career,” his job was to present what facts were known about the disease, and to suggest (not dictate) actions that the government might (should?) take. Political party shouldn’t come into it. And of course, his loss of credibility (intentionally telling 2 different stories on masks, which you can call “strategic,” but it’s still lying, and it was no “mistake”) happened while Trump was in office, so this can’t be painted as a bunch of MAGA yahoos disagreeing with Fauci because they disagreed with the party in power. I can’t remember if his pushing the “must be zoonotic, couldn’t possibly have escaped from a lab” story was during that time, but I believe it was.

In his position as a scientist, he should have been willing to consider other evidence, not from Tom, Dick, and Harry, but respected virologists and epidemiologists from all over the U.S. and the world, and be willing to modify what he was saying if their evidence panned out. Painting them as being only politically motivated because they were saying something other than he was is not the action of scientist in search of what is true, it’s the action of a purely political bureaucrat.

Again, speaking for myself, I wasn’t inclined to distrust what he said until he admitted saying something he didn’t believe for political reasons. He should have told the truth instead. At the beginning, we were all trying to make sense out of a fast-moving virus. Once it became clear that actions were being suggested that were purely political in nature, a lot of distrust was created. That can’t be chalked up to “fast moving virus, mistakes were made.”

If he saw his job as political, not scientific, he should have let other, real scientists talk about the disease before putting his political spin on it.

You had people claiming horse medicine was the cure

This is more evidence of how the media has distorted the truth. Sure, Ivermectin has been used to treat horses, but it has also been used to treat humans for a variety of conditions and has been approved for human use since 1987. It is not just a "horse medicine." Whether or not it has any effect on Covid is still in the process of being peer reviewed (IE consensus has not been reached). To simply call it a "horse medicine" is either blatant propaganda or ignorance of facts. If it is simply ignorance, I do not fault you. We cannot all know every fact, but it does show how easily each of us can be affected by the propaganda of others within the media. Don't feel too bad about it. It has happened to me as well. Just be aware of it.

Dave,

His position is an appointed position by the president and he secures his job at the pleasure of the head of the executive branch of the United States. While he is a scientist, he is a political appointing and his function was to:

The Office of the Director (OD) determines Institute programs, plans, and policies and provides management, program analysis, and scientific program reporting services to the Institute, as well as scientific leadership, policy guidance, and overall operational and administrative coordination.

The OD serves as the chief liaison with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director, other components of of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), other federal agencies, Congress, professional societies, voluntary health organizations, and other public health groups. It also coordinates the activities of NIAID extramural and intramural divisions.

If you don't think the chief liaison between all of these groups that included a contentious executive branch and a contentious Congress did not involve politics than you are misguided on how the government operates. Even after he talked from the lectern, President Trump would get up (his boss) and discredit him or talk about something that was totally unscientific like when he said that we should consider injecting disinfects to see if that would make a difference.

He did suggest actions not dictate them. The NIH cannot dictate enforcement policies. That was local governments. The NIH can't dictate mask enforcement at the Target or the city of Chicago. You know this right? Or did you think his comments became law. Do you think that Fauci was entirely rouge. Was not listening to his staff? He urged vaccinations. There were no dictates to get vaccinated for the general public.

Ivermectin was first used and is still primarily used as a livestock dewormer. Many countries it is not approved for use in humans. There were many cases of people in the early stages taking the livestock dewormer to help them prevent COVID, which is dangerous. It was later approved in the US and is used in some cases, but the vast majority of its use is in livestock.

And yes Ivermectin has been proven (and consensus reached) to not be effective against COVID for humans.