Michael Brown complained in his July 12 column:
According to a recent survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports, “58% of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat agree that the media are ‘truly the enemy of the people,’ including 34% who Strongly Agree.”
If these statistics are accurate, this means that this extreme level of distrust cannot simply be blamed on former President Trump’s rhetoric, from his calling the mainstream media “fake news” to referring to the media as “the enemy of the people.” The distrust must go deeper than that.
[…]As for Republican doubts about the reliability of the political news they are hearing, I would say the much higher numbers are due to: 1) the high percentage of mainstream news outlets that lean left; 2) Trump’s incessant attacks on these outlets; 3) the amount of “fake news” that really is being propagated.
With regard to the second question, Nolte wrote, “When asked, ‘how serious is the “fake news” problem in the media?’ a WHOPPING 83 percent said very (55 percent) or somewhat (28 percent) serious. Only 14 percent said not very (9 percent) or not at all (5 percent) serious.”
Again, the concern about “fake news” was bipartisan (92 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of Democrats agreed that fake news is either a very serious or somewhat serious problem), which also indicates the degree to which political news outlets in particular are known for being highly partisan themselves.
Just ask your average Republican if they trust CNN or your average Democrat if they trust Fox, and you’re like to get the same answer from both, something like, “Are you kidding?”
Brown is feigning a lot of ignorance here. Right-wing hatred of the media didn’t start with Trump — he simply ratcheted it up to a new level. Right-wing orgs like the Media Research Center spend millions of dollars every year to reinforce the right-wing narrative that every non-right-wing media outlet is “liberal” and, thus, not trustworthy, conflating isolated incidents into blanket indictments.
Brown continued:
Again, I have no doubt that some of the mistrust and animosity toward political news outlets has been stoked by Trump. But it’s also clear that he was not simply punching the air. Instead, he threw a match into a bucket of gasoline that was already there.
What this should mean to all of us who, in any way, report on the news is simple: We need to do our best to be as accurate and unbiased as we can be, making clear where the news stops and our opinions begin. And we need to encourage pushback and scrutiny and dialogue and debate.
Otherwise, we do everyone a disservice.
He does have a point there. What he won’t do, however, is apply that standard to the main media outlet that publishes him, WND. We’ve repeatedly caught WND publishing fake news and misinformation. What has Brown ever said about that? What has he done to steer WND in the correct direction? Nothing that we know of.
If Brown won’t hold the outlets that publish him responsible for the accuracy of their reportage, his words are hollow, and he’s just parroting right-wing narratives.