Trust in the legacy news media today is so low than only one in 25 U.S. adult citizens place a great deal of trust in what they’re being told by television and newspaper reports, results of a new national survey reveal.
In the latest poll by The Economist/YouGov, conducted October 24-27, Americans were asked to rate the level of confidence they have in various institutions.
The Wall Street Journal gets it.
In Friday’s edition, Journal columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. closed his column by saying, more than accurately, this, with bold print for emphasis supplied:
I’m guessing many flyover Democrats have long seen the party’s blunder in associating itself too closely with the national media. The self-defeating Russia hoax, the shameless, unnecessary politicization of Covid—both helped Mr. Trump. Most damning was the conniving of Team Biden to push a senile, unpopular incumbent past voters a second time even at the highly probable risk of returning Mr. Trump to the White House…
The news that the horrific Palisades Fire in Los Angeles was probably caused by an arsonist contradicted all the dramatic climate-change proclamations tied to the disaster. But the evening broadcast networks took it a step further and buried the breaking news that the accused arsonist is an eco-extremist.
CBS News staffers are coming to terms with the news that controversial commentator Bari Weiss is their new editor-in-chief, as the storied network’s owner Paramount Skydance acquires her Substack-based publication the Free Press in a reported $150m deal.
In conversations with the Guardian, six current network employees expressed a mixture of apprehension, skepticism and frustration over the appointment, though several stressed they wanted to wait to see what it would really mean for their network – and themselves.
“A throwing up emoji is not enough of a reflection of the feelings in here,” one particularly incensed CBS News employee said in a text message.
h/t DS
Puck’s Dylan Byers dropped the bombshell Wednesday night that the rumored deal was “on the 1-yard-line” for CBS News’s parent company SkyDance to acquire former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s indefatigable site The Free Press and grant Weiss a senior role inside CBS News.
Predictably, this has and will continue to send liberal journalists both inside the network and outside it into hissy fits that will dwarf one-time CNN boss Chris Licht’s failed desires (and orders from his superiors at Warner Bros. Discovery) to return the network to a serious news outlet and not a Trump hate factory.
Howard Stern didn’t just have a radio show. He had a revolution. He was brash, vulgar, and fearless. He gave voice to the silenced, told dirty jokes with conviction, and turned a microphone into a battering ram against establishment sanctimony. But somewhere along the line, the rebel became the regime.
In the 1980s, Stern made his mark as a shock jock icon, captivating millions with raw, uncensored radio that thumbed its nose at polite society. He was a champion of free speech, someone who understood that everyday Americans—especially working-class listeners—wanted truth, not scripted politeness. He gave it to them, and they gave him their loyalty.
Between July 14 and July 20, the name “Epstein” was uttered 160 times on Fox News, which seems a little excessive for a one-week period. It comes to roughly 23 mentions/stories a day, and an “Epstein” each hour.
As the world of “public” broadcasting faces the rebuke of Congress rescinding its billion dollars, it spurs a broader thought about the arrogance of liberal journalists at national media outlets. They’re not simply arrogant. They sound remarkably insincere.
Start with a man named Michael Tribble, the chief content officer at WAMU, the NPR station in the nation’s capital. He sent out a fundraising email after the Senate rebuke, oozing to their liberal supporters: “You’re part of a community that believes facts matter, that context matters, and that journalism has the power to bring us closer together.”
The controversial departure of Travis Dhanraj from the CBC might have, according to his former employers’ spokesperson, “saddened” their top brass. But it was treated with great delight by Conservatives who have long doubted whether the Crown Corporation’s slavish adherence to diversity in terms of colour, gender, sexuality, and ethic origin extended to the realms of intellectual and ideological debate.
It is now taken as settled science that the media largely—and this is a professional, expert term—sucks. The reasons for that are well-known and also settled, accepted science. Who would dare be a science denier? The media suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, they hate America and Americans and they’re among the self-imagined elite who think themselves better than everyone else. They’re not. They’re mostly white but think white people racist. They’re congenital liars and have no idea what a sincere apology might be. Actually, they’re pretty clueless on the whole sincerity thing. They’re the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, yet some of them weakly continue to deny that.
It’s humiliating for them.
You may have seen the news Wednesday that President Trump has settled what was a $20 billion lawsuit with the parent company of CBS News over its edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris for much less. From CBS’s own reporting of the settlement …
NEW YORK (AP) — In a case seen as a challenge to American , the press getting away with lying to American public in support of its extreme left wing agenda, Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump over the editing of CBS’ “ 60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in October.free-speech principles
Paramount, which owns CBS, said the money will go to Trump’s future presidential library, not to the Republican president himself. It said the settlement did not involve an apology.
h/t DS
There are some topics that Canada’s media are clearly very afraid to touch, leaving the public that funds them through federal subsidies not fully informed.
This, for reasons suspected but unexplained, is not good if we are to rely upon the Fourth Estate to ensure the nation’s population is equipped with the information citizens need to form perspectives and organize their lives. That, after all, is the alleged purpose of the government’s subsidization of the media in the first place.
The last-place cable news network hits rock bottom, but still keeps digging.
Among the errors to which journalists are prone, none is so common as the delusion of instant expertise. Assign a reporter to do an article about theoretical physics, and by the time he files his story, he’ll be convinced he’s Stephen Hawking. You see this sort of phony expertise everywhere in the media nowadays, including sports, where every ESPN panelist offers his predictions with rock-solid confidence, and never acknowledges his mistake when the team he’d picked to win ends up on the wrong side of a lopsided blowout.
CNN’s Erin Burnett says there’s a “friendliness” to Iranians who chant ‘Death to America’:
“I remember, Dana, one point being in Tehran years ago and they’re chanting death to America all around me, even as I say, ‘oh, I'm an American, reporting for CNN.’ And they were happy to… pic.twitter.com/nvQkD77cFD
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 24, 2025
As I see it, there were three big stories this week: the media’s pretense that it was ignorant of Biden’s infirmities when it mattered; the cold-blooded assassination in D.C. of two young employees of the Israeli embassy, and the president’s refusal to join in the whitewashing of the genocide in South Africa. Examination of the details of these events reveals beyond the possibility of doubt that the mainstream press here and abroad is guided by anti-truth, antisemitic, anti-white, and anti-Western civilization animus. The press deserves a harsh reckoning: ignore them, drive down circulation and views, expose their lies and agenda.
