Trust in TV News Sources

[MacAttack]

Do you trust your local TV new source? If so, which is it and why?

In the the pic I put reflects the United States population trust. Do you agree/disagree? Do we need a poll?

 

[peter grimes]

No link to source??

It would be helpful to know exactly what data Brookings was using.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Trust them for what? An unbiased report?

 

[Borachio]

Sure. I trust (for some as yet undefined meaning of the word "trust") the BBC. Whenever they've deliberately lied to me, they've generally told me that that was what they were doing. Mostly. Now and again they've been plain wrong about something, but then they've told me they were.

I mean, what does it matter whether I know all the ins and outs of every little event in the world, anyway? It's not like what I do (if I do anything) on the basis of what I hear on the News is going to affect someone in anything other than the most trivial fashion.

 

[JollyRoger]

I trust them to get the facts wrong most of the time.

 

[KMRblue1027]

I trust Maddow, just about no one else on TV News.

(And Jon Stewart and John Oliver but they don't really count)

 

[Zelig]

I don't trust any source whose primary source of income is from commercial advertisement.

 

[Cutlass]

None of the TV news is all that great these days. Big money interests control it all.

 

[Gary Childress]

Is this table actually saying that viewers of Fox News are the most trusting of their media? That's actually sort of a sad statement for a news source. I would think a healthy degree of skepticism toward the news is generally a good thing. Any source can make mistakes, skew things or just miss the complete picture at least most of the time. So the table in the OP seems almost perhaps inverted with respect to the quality of listeners who invest their times in these sources.

I'm just surprised public TV is not rated higher.

 

[Cutlass]

The viewers of Fox News are the choir being preached to.

 

[tetley]

A good gauge for me is their facebook page. Many let you comment on their FB and let you see your own comment, but unbeknownst to you (unless you check with a different FB account) your comment was actually censored. I figure, if they're doing that kind of deceptive reporting on FB, then they are probably doing the same on TV.

 

[warpus]

I trust CBC and BBC enough to inform me of things that are happening, but I might not always believe their explanations of why whatever is happening is happening.

I always check other sources either way though. The internet is my favourite news source. There's a lot of liars and crazy people out there, so it's not so easy at times to figure out why things are happening, but it's much easier to figure out what is happening, than it was.. say.. 20 years ago. I'm not going to invest crazy amounts of time into figuring out what is going on in the world and why, so that's good enough for me.

 

[Aleksey_aka_al]

Source is nothing. Evidence is everything. Opinion is a waste.

 

[Quintillus]

If Fox News is the most trusted news source in the U.S., then I have no hope for the future of the country.

The good news is the source for this data does not itself appear to be particularly trustworthy. From what little information is posted here, I could even see this being sourced from Fox News itself.

I don't watch TV myself, but of the major television networks I'm aware of, I'd probably put the BBC as the most trustworthy. Unfortunately they aren't that readily available here in the Thirteen Colonies.

 

[Hygro]

I trust Maddow, just about no one else on TV News.

(And Jon Stewart and John Oliver but they don't really count)

Chris Hayes sometimes has Stephanie Kelton on his show so that's pretty legit. I'd add him to the very, very small list of TV anchors I trust. Add in Colbert and that's my list.

 

[KMRblue1027]

Chris Hayes sometimes has Stephanie Kelton on his show so that's pretty legit. I'd add him to the very, very small list of TV anchors I trust. Add in Colbert and that's my list.

I forgot about Hayes, he's Maddow's student so it makes sense. Personally I find Colbert's parody sadly too real that it makes my blood boil. 5 years ago it was funny as hell but the GOP is Colbert's character now and that scares me.

 

[Hygro]

I forgot about Hayes, he's Maddow's student so it makes sense. Personally I find Colbert's parody sadly too real that it makes my blood boil. 5 years ago it was funny as hell but the GOP is Colbert's character now and that scares me.

And he's leading them off a cliff a 30 year, wait until the boomers die cliff

Decent chances they're going to get crazier and crazier with age. They're the first generation to trust their internal intellects above all else, and reasoning inside the echo chamber gets louder, and louder, and louder, until the speakers catch fire and everyone's hearing is destroyed. I hope it mellows out with economic recovery, which will happen when more people learn that we can run persistent deficits, bottom up.

Our generation trusts our intellects but we also trust that our intellects fail us all the time and have huge blind spots.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

No. Saudi TV does generally get most of the weather report right, but they tend to lie about the maximum temperatures.

 

[downtown]

I cancel my TV at home after college basketball season ends, and don't restore it until right before college football. Outside of sports I need to watch for work, I watch virtually no TV at all. I couldn't tell you who my local anchor is.

I've said this a few times before, but I don't think as highly of TV news as a *medium*, since their scripts are so short, and their advertising model makes them a little more motivated for craven sensationalist stuff than print or digital. At work, we often have a TV on mute for CNN, but rarely does anybody actually listen to it.

It isn't so much a matter of *trust* (I don't think all of them are too BIASED, per se), it's that I think the confines of their medium prevent them from telling a story as well as if I could read it somewhere.

 

[Borachio]

Ah, right TV News Sources. I missed the TV, for some reason.

No, I don't pay any attention to the TV at all. Big waste of time and electricity, imo.

And worse than that, if there's advertizing on it, it will surely poison your life.