Congrats, Conservative Media: Even Your Fans Don’t Always Trust You

The main headline out of Pew Research Center’s latest study, “The Political Gap in Americans’ News Sources,” seems pretty self-evident: Democratic or “leans Democratic” voters and their Republican counterparts gravitate toward different news outlets along that partisan divide.

Yes, we live in isolated news silos and echo chambers, nothing to see here, move along.

Look a little closer, though, and another trend line reveals that conservatives tend to cast a narrower net in terms of where they get news and information, and broadly speaking trust all sources of media — including those with which they’re ideological in tune — less than Democrats. That’s a logical byproduct of decades of pounding on the mainstream (sorry, “lamestream”) media and seeking to undermine traditional journalism, dating back to Rush Limbaugh and the early days of Fox News.

So pat yourselves on the back, conservative media. You’ve done your job so well, even your ostensible allies don’t always trust you, having been led down a “Do your own research” path that has shaken their faith in everything, fueled the growth of niche influencers and helped undermine the notion of objective truth.

The Pew study does find one source, not surprisingly, which stands head and shoulders above others that conservatives overwhelmingly trust — Fox News, gravitating toward the channel like man’s early forebears to the Monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Even there, though, a full 21% of GOP respondents indicated they didn’t trust Fox (versus 58% that do), a higher “Distrust” number than Democrats harbor for any of the major broadcast networks, PBS, CNN and MSNBC, by margins of two, three and as many as five times that percentage, depending on the outlet. (Notably, PBS fares better in the “distrust” column, at 4% Democratic and 26% Republican, than any of the commercial networks, which makes the defunding campaign being waged by the GOP labeling it liberal propaganda seem even more unhinged.)

Like the top-line title of the study, this observation has the advantage of intuitively making sense. But it also requires a bit of context and history to understand the “why” behind the data, based on polling conducted in March with nearly 9,500 respondents.

“Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to both use and trust a number of major news sources,” the researchers found. By contrast, Republicans are far more likely “to distrust than trust all of these sources,” while harboring higher “trust” ratios for less-seen alternatives like Newsmax and Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Even then, GOP/lean GOP respondents exhibited a higher level of skepticism relative to Democrats, with the business-friendly Wall Street Journal (23% to 21%) and right-wing website Breitbart (10% to 8%) each exhibiting only slightly higher “trust” than “distrust” levels within the smaller samples that cited them as sources of news.

Among the 15 most-cited outlets, GOP/lean GOP respondents didn’t fall below 21% distrust on any of them (including Fox), while Democrats registered a single-digit distrust factor on a dozen.

Again, it’s easy enough to trace this back to Limbaugh’s enormously influential radio show, which established the template — trust us, and only us — that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch would successfully bring to television with Fox News’ “Fair and balanced” and “We Report. You Decide” slogans.

More recently, the conservative movement has splintered into a web of Trump-friendly influencers who aren’t above questioning even traditional GOP media strongholds, such as the Murdoch-owned WSJ (whose editorial page has briefly departed from bashing Democrats to criticize Trump’s tariff policies), New York Post and Fox News.

From the QAnon movement to the various conspiracy theories that fill right-wing social media, there’s ample evidence that despite Limbaugh and Ailes’ goal of balancing what they saw as a playing field tilted toward the Democrats, they inadvertently unleashed an unpredictable monster, fueled by modern technology, which they can’t always control.

As Pew notes, the latest survey is broadly comparable to one the center conducted in 2019, with some variance in the way the questions were posed as well as the sources that were included.

Nevertheless, there are practical implications to the findings, especially when pairing them with a recent analysis by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, which found an asymmetrical gap between Trump-supporting influencers — many of whom don’t self-identify as being primarily political — and left-leaning voices, as Democrats fret, in the wake of their election losses, how to overcome that deficit.

Like other recent data, Pew’s report doesn’t provide those engaged in that soul-searching project with many easy or reassuring answers. Because the bottom line is it’s hard to talk to people, much less convince them of anything, when they won’t even listen.

The post Congrats, Conservative Media: Even Your Fans Don’t Always Trust You appeared first on TheWrap.