Poll of the Day > How much do you trust the media

(+) Yeah! (+)

I believe everything I see and hear

Canadian media? Though biased most of it is telling the truth.

The weather predictions though, completely wrong.

Depends on the outlet that's reporting. Some are more accurate/less biased than others.

Looking at your poll options, it's clear you have a very juvenile perception of the media, however.

Media in general is barely reliable, because the 24-hour news cycle and pandering/sensationalism for engagement means there's no real motivation to be accurate and factual - there is far more motivation to rush stories to get the scoop or turn them into clickbait to draw eyes. Combined with the fact that most major media sources are owned by massive corporations now, and "corporate synergy" is always going to be a risk (ie, can you trust a site like Rotten Tomatoes to be totally unbiased when it's owned by Warner Bros and Universal? Can you trust major game review sites to be unbiased when negative reviews can easily result in them being blacklisted for pre-release codes and perks in the future?).

And that's not counting the various sources who've decided that ideology is more important than factuality (or who simply pander to the ideological extremes for engagement), on both sides of the political spectrum, who treat "news" as a rhetoric pulpit to push their own agendas.

If you read between the lines of multiple conflicting news sources, or do your best to go back to primary sources, you can get a rough idea of what's going on, but you can never really be sure if you're getting anything close to the truth.


There have been three times in my life when I knew the details of a story in advance that later went on to be national/international news. In every single one of those cases the news got the story completely wrong. Not in a "got some of the details wrong" sort of way, but in a "got the entirety of the story wrong". And I'm not talking about minor or random news sources, I'm talking most major news sources (who were all mainly pulling their info from AP or Reuters anyway). If you only knew about what happened in those cases from the news alone, your perception of what actually happened would be entirely wrong.

So from my perspective, in the only cases where I was actually capable of corroborating or fact-checking the news, they have been completely wrong 100% of the time. That's not really going to inspire confidence in the news in general - if they were that bad at the stories I could verify, how terrible are they are the ones I can't?

Colonel_Lingus posted...

Depends on the outlet that's reporting. Some are more accurate/less biased than others.

Looking at your poll options, it's clear you have a very juvenile perception of the media, however.

Pretty much exactly this. Some outlets are extremely unreliable, others are pretty decent. It's also worth defining exactly what "trust" means in this context: Blindly trusting everything anyone says is pretty much never a good idea, regardless of who they are. Incorporating your own fact-checking to help shape your beliefs is always going to be a good idea when it's easy to do so or when those beliefs are likely to have significant consequences, even if you're hearing the report from a trustworthy source. To say "I trust *outlet*" is a statement that can have a wide range of meanings.

It's something you need to be deciding on a case by case basis, not distilling into a 1-10 scale with heavily loaded textual qualifiers. But then TC only ever makes topics to fish for reasons to think less of people based on rigid pre-existing biases, so we can't really expect such nuance.

I'm on a 5 with this one. Some stories are true but you have to read or watch though a lot of crap to get to the actual point. Other stories are just flat out fake based on rubbish stories found on the internet such as my sister is my dad half brother.

The correct answer was 2-4

10

they do not have any reason to lie to me

Depends on the media.

ItIsSoOver posted...

The correct answer was 2-4

*suprised pikachu face*

Not one bit. They tuld me that Trump didn't have a chance against Clinton and changed the entire trajectory of our great nation

it does depend on the organization. USA has a lot of, if not entirely, 1s. in Canada, I think CTV is more or less neutral. not sure about CBC. Global is sensationalist but not sure about bias.

Canadian news is mostly fine, I'd say about a 7. There are strict regulatory standards that they need to follow in order to legally qualify as "news".

US news on the other hand is an abomination.

Anyone that lives in an OECD country and says anything under 50% is well on their way to nutjob territory. I even voted 6 because a lot of what any single media source is biased/badly reported but the reason I know that is because I can see other media sources and figure stuff out. Like, if you actually think you don't trust the media but then listen to what people around you say then you are actually just trusting the media second-hand. If you don't even have that then you're some crackpot out in the woods that doesn't even know who's president right now.

Seth Meyers Closer Look is the only news you need.

I just want the facts. The unaltered, truthful facts. And I will form my own opinion from there.

most of you are landing in the correct range or at least within 1 point of it
better than I expected

Some of you must have shaky hands and missed the 10.

EvilResident posted...

I just want the facts. The unaltered, truthful facts. And I will form my own opinion from there.

Genuinely factual information is a lot rarer than people like to think it is. The information you take in always ends up being filtered and curated in some capacity based on what you think is relevant and the limitations of your observational methods, and in the case of anything you aren't personally observing, those biases get compounded for each additional person in the chain and further filtered by what they consider necessary to communicate.

Pretty much everything you know about the world and especially about history (there's actually no such thing as "historical fact") has been subjectively influenced in some capacity. We rely pretty much entirely on "true enough," rather than being able to verify any sort of absolute truth.

Yup. The George Floyd incident was the biggest proof of that

If it's something like a person was killed and a suspect was detained or some random shit like about a local event going on yeah sure I'll believe them. If it's even slightly political I assume a narrative is being pushed. I will assume any video footage is clipped and presented out of context.

Wish news was like how I heard it used to be. They just matter factly told you what appeared to happen what was said and kept their opinions out of it and let the viewers form their own.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

Wish news was like how I heard it used to be. They just matter factly told you what appeared to happen what was said and kept their opinions out of it and let the viewers form their own.

There's a particular irony in you taking what you've heard in that regard as a matter-of-fact statement of what happened that keeps the speaker's opinions out of it.

Virtually without exception, whenever anyone says "X news is objective and unbiased," they actually mean "X news agrees with my biases so I don't notice them." This is true whether you're talking about extant news outlets or nostalgic reminiscence of how news supposedly used to be.

Media is too broad of a term to simply choose a place on a spectrum between trust and distrust. There's all kinds of media but I'm gonna guess this is about news. And that'll depend on how it's curated by the individual.

adjl posted...

There's a particular irony in you taking what you've heard in that regard as a matter-of-fact statement of what happened that keeps the speaker's opinions out of it.

Virtually without exception, whenever anyone says "X news is objective and unbiased," they actually mean "X news agrees with my biases so I don't notice them." This is true whether you're talking about extant news outlets or nostalgic reminiscence of how news supposedly used to be.

I mean like just saying there was a conference held today and the speaker said this... and leaving it at that. Or saying the police apprehended a suspect of x crime and leaving it at that. Now days they try way harder to influence how you feel about it.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

I mean like just saying there was a conference held today and the speaker said this... and leaving it at that. Or saying the police apprehended a suspect of x crime and leaving it at that. Now days they try way harder to influence how you feel about it.

Again, genuinely factual information is a lot rarer than people like to think it is. Even if something's presented as being "just the facts," it's usually not *all* the facts, only the facts that the writer saw fit to include, which means a whole lot of curation has gone into the report. The push to be passive often also ends up (intentionally or otherwise) lending credence to a side of the story that really doesn't deserve it. Consider these two headlines, describing the same event:

-"Pedestrian killed after collision with vehicle in crosswalk with lights flashing"
-"Driver strikes and kills pedestrian in crosswalk with lights flashing"

Most would say the former is the correct way to frame it, being more "passive." Both state exactly the same factual information, but the standard is to use the former wording to avoid putting too much blame on the driver. The effect of that, however, is to paint the incident as being at least partially the pedestrian's fault, or otherwise some sort of inevitable accident that we just have to feel bad about and accept instead of blaming the negligence of the driver and infrastructure that fails to protect pedestrians from that negligence. It is, in fact, the driver's fault, but that "neutral" reporting avoids acknowledging that and leaves room to misinterpret the facts of the situation.

adjl posted...

Again, genuinely factual information is a lot rarer than people like to think it is. Even if something's presented as being "just the facts," it's usually not *all* the facts, only the facts that the writer saw fit to include, which means a whole lot of curation has gone into the report. The push to be passive often also ends up (intentionally or otherwise) lending credence to a side of the story that really doesn't deserve it. Consider these two headlines, describing the same event:

-"Pedestrian killed after collision with vehicle in crosswalk with lights flashing"
-"Driver strikes and kills pedestrian in crosswalk with lights flashing"

Most would say the former is the correct way to frame it, being more "passive." Both state exactly the same factual information, but the standard is to use the former wording to avoid putting too much blame on the driver. The effect of that, however, is to paint the incident as being at least partially the pedestrian's fault, or otherwise some sort of inevitable accident that we just have to feel bad about and accept instead of blaming the negligence of the driver and infrastructure that fails to protect pedestrians from that negligence. It is, in fact, the driver's fault, but that "neutral" reporting avoids acknowledging that and leaves room to misinterpret the facts of the situation.

My point is they try to hard now days to tell you how to feel about it. That shouldn't be the case. And what I mean is where they gotta run off at the mouth after telling the story with their opinions on the matter Moreso than how they frame it. Just tell the story and move on.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

My point is they try to hard now days to tell you how to feel about it. That shouldn't be the case. And what I mean is where they gotta run off at the mouth after telling the story with their opinions on the matter Moreso than how they frame it. Just tell the story and move on.

There's still plenty of news that gives "just the facts" (as much as anyone can, because again you're never really *just* being given the facts). If you're getting too many opinions, odds are you're reading opinion pieces, in which case, that's really on you.

adjl posted...

There's still plenty of news that gives "just the facts" (as much as anyone can, because again you're never really *just* being given the facts). If you're getting too many opinions, odds are you're reading opinion pieces, in which case, that's really on you.

I'm talking tv news specifically.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

I'm talking tv news specifically.

TV news naturally tends to be more opinion pieces because "just the facts" news is too boring to keep people watching through commercials. I recommend reading more.

adjl posted...

TV news naturally tends to be more opinion pieces because "just the facts" news is too boring to keep people watching through commercials. I recommend reading more.

It used to not be. Not everything needs to be entertaining.

People have too short of attention spans these days it seems

Sufferedphoenix posted...

It used to not be. Not everything needs to be entertaining.

It does when there are more interesting alternatives.

Therein lies the root of sensationalism: Nobody's going to watch your version of the news (and, more saliently, sit through the commercials you need to fund it) if a more interesting version exists. If there were ever a time when news could get away with being boring (and there actually wasn't, you can find plenty of examples of opinions being stated in news reports from every era despite what some nostalgic people might tell you), it was solely because there weren't alternatives.

Anyone who ignores the media is uninformed

Anyone who watches the media is misinformed

I stopped trusting the media as soon as I saw this.

https://youtu.be/JmaZR8E12bs?si=Iyl9OpQQrSJRW7Pc

All you have to do is skip to 2:00 to see that they're literally just trying to manipulate you.

I'm not saying it's just the left that does this, btw. The right definitely does too. But at this point it's just so pathetically obvious how ingenuine the media is.

Also Let's Go Brandon? Yeah...totally trust the media.

From what I know the most reliable sources with the least amount of bias are AP and Reuters.

Understand that all of our media outlets are now owned by about 3/4 major corporations like Disney and Fox and they both project about 90% lies and 10% of truth and none of it matters because the lies they tell in regards to politics has divided this country beyond repair.

I only watch Luke Beasley and TYT Sports.

There's no reason to trust the media.