Poll shows mainstream media losing credibility with its current political coverage

Paul Bedard:

More voters than not find the Big Three network newscasts and the nation’s three largest liberal newspapers “untrustworthy,” continuing a trend that started long before President Trump hit the scene, but one that has escalated since he moved into the White House.

The latest Zogby Poll found that 48 percent believe the media biggies — CBS, ABC, NBC, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post -- are untrustworthy while 45 percent said they could trust them. The rest were unsure.
...

Trump voters are the most distrusting of the top six news outlets, but there are many other differences, Zogby found:

• A majority of men, 52 percent, said the “Big Six” are untrustworthy.
• A plurality of women, 47 percent, believes the media is trustworthy.
• Two-thirds of Democrats say they trust the media.
• 69 percent of Republicans don’t trust the networks and three newspapers.

As for Trump voters, “The divide was also even more prevalent,” said the survey.

Seven in ten Trump supporters polled view the mainstream media as not trustworthy, including half who say the "big six" are not trustworthy at all. Of the voters polled who disapprove of Trump, two thirds trust media outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS and newspapers of record The New York Times, the LA Times, and the Washington Post.
...

For Trump voters, it is hard to find even a veneer of fairness in their reporting Many times more than 90 percent of the reporting is negative toward Trump and his administration.    They are beating a drum of opposition and the Trump votes are just tuning them out.

Sharyl Attkisson also explains why people are turned off by the partisan and unfair coverage.

Prager U teamed up with the author of The Smear, Sharyl Attkisson, who highlighted the fact that the age of unbiased, nonpartisan reporting is not only gone, but that reporting with bias is often encouraged and rewarded.

“First, firewalls that once strictly separated news from opinion have been replaced by hopelessly blurred lines. Once-forbidden practices, such as editorializing within straight news reports and the inclusion of opinions as if fact, are not only tolerated—they’re encouraged,” said Attkisson. “The result: It’s never been harder for Americans to separate news that’s real from news that’s not.”

Attkisson gave the example of a recent New York Times piece where Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey interviewed Trump’s ex-girlfriend, Rowanne Lane. The story not only took Lane’s quotes out of context — a thing Lane called out when the story was published — but provided their own quotes and presented them as facts:

Once the story was published, she publicly accused the Times of misleading her, writing a “hit piece” against Trump and putting a “negative connotation” on what—she said—was “not…a negative experience.”

No matter where you stand, this was a huge development in terms of journalism: the main source behind front-page national news discredited the entire premise of the story.

“You’d expect something like that to rock the whole news organization and prompt investigations, a retraction, and re-examination of policies,” said Attkisson. “Yet, I can find no record of any of that. The Times and their reporters never even apologized or printed a correction.”
...

There is more including a showing of how disparate the treatment is of gaffes by candidates.

Here is another example where the media deliberately misreported a speech by President Trump on his Japanese trip.