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Monday, July 6th, 2015

Poll: 70 percent of Americans believe news media is intentionally biased

Author:     Eddie Scarry
Source:     Washington Examiner
Publication Date:     July 3, 2015 | 11:34 am
Link: Poll: 70 percent of Americans believe news media is intentionally biased
Stephan:   Another alarm goes off. A democracy cannot be healthy when almost three out of four people do not trust that the news media is honest and unbiased. Commentary and advocacy are fine  And also note that the sense of bias and mistrust has gone up 17 per cent in just one year. This ought to be a subject actively debated yet it goes almost unremarked. Why is that do you think that is?

Nearly three quarters of Americans believe the news media reports with an intentional bias, according to a new survey.

The 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, conducted by the First Amendment Center and USA Today, was released Friday. It shows that only 24 percent of American adults agree with the statement that “overall, the news media tries to report the news without bias,” while 70 percent disagree. (emphasis added)

When the question was asked last year, 41 percent agreed, a 17-point difference.

“These are discouraging results for those of us who have spent our careers in journalism,” Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Thursday. “In 23 years in newsrooms, I saw consistent and concerted efforts to get stories right. Clearly, the public’s not convinced.”

The survey suggests that controversies this year that engulfed national news anchors Brian Williams of NBC and George Stephanopoulos of ABC may have had a deep impact on public trust in media. It also floats the idea that the public has had a negative reaction to news coverage of the racially-charged events in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Md.

Other findings in the survey:

• Only 19 percent of […]

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