Maybe COVID-19 really is making people wake up!

[JGeropoulas]

A landmark survey of 20,000 Americans took part in the Gallup/Knight poll of Americans' relationship with the news.

• Half (49%) of all Americans think the media is very biased. Fifty-six percent say their own news sources are biased, and seven in 10 are concerned about bias in the news others are getting. Eight percent — driven largely by conservatives — say distrusted media are trying to ruin the country.
• Americans think the media is pushing an agenda. Three in four people (74%) worry that owners of media companies are influencing coverage, up five points since 2017. They also suspect that inaccuracies in reporting are purposeful, with 54% believing that reporters misrepresent the facts, and 28% believing reporters make them up entirely.
• Americans are overwhelmed by the speed and volume of information, and the Internet is making it worse. Three in four (72%) Americans think the leading cause of information overload is the mix of news and non-news online, including on social media. Nearly eight in 10 (78%) think misinformation online is the leading problem with news today.
• Americans want more newsroom diversity, but they differ on what kind of diversity is needed. Democrats (49%) and blacks (60%) prioritize racial/ethnic diversity in hiring, while Republicans (51%) and whites (35%) prioritize ideological diversity in journalists’ political views.
• Americans blame the media for political divisions, but they also see the potential for the media to heal these divides. Eighty-four percent of Americans say the media is to blame for political division in this country. Still, 84% also say the media can serve as a healing force.
• Local news plays a key role in civic engagement. People who read and watch local news are more likely to take part in important community issues, like voting. Those who follow local news “very closely” are more than twice as likely than those who do not to participate in local elections—81% versus 35%, respectively.
• Distrust of the media cuts along partisan lines. Seventy-five percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of the media, and 61% say attacks on the media are justified. But only 22% of Democrats have an unfavorable view, and 70% say that attacks are not justified.

While pessimism about the media has deepened across the board over the past two years, it is most pronounced among Republicans.
“Most Americans have lost confidence in the media to deliver the news objectively,” said Sam Gill, Knight’s senior vice president and chief program officer. “This is corrosive for our democracy."

The report states, low levels of public trust in the media have “left open the possibility for dangerous false narratives to take root in all segments of society.”

NOTE this last line reveals the writer's untenable position that the media tells the truth, so Americans losing confidence in it makes them MORE vulnerable to believing "dangerous false narratives" from alternative sources of information. This begs the question of, why would Americans lose confidence in the media if it had a stellar record of telling the truth?

In fact, just the opposite is true: the media lies have become so blatant and routine that Americans have lost confidence in it, which makes them LESS vulnerable to believing "dangerous false narratives" from the media!

Gallup/Knight Poll: Americans’ concerns about media bias deepen, even as they see it as vital for democracy

Update: On Nov. 9, 2020, Gallup updated the report “American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy,” to correct a methodological…

knightfoundation.org

 

[SOTTREADER]

I wouldn't be too quick to trust any studies produced by the mainstream on this.

At the moment it looks like they are building the foundation to legally censor all material that is counter to the mainstream.

They need justification before they can enact all the new measures and part of that justification is showing that the majority of people have fallen to wrong-think and the situation is dangerous because of you know, covid. The studies don't even have to be true, they can just make the results of the poll up just as long as what it shows lends itself to them being able to push an agenda.

The laws will then be put in place to control the narrative on covid but in future these can easily be expanded to correct wrong-think in other areas that the PTB deem important.

 

[Color]

I find both to be true - people waking up to media manipulative narratives and also people completely being taken over by it. And yes, we can be sure how PTB will use any developing scenarios as a tool for furthering their agenda, either by twisting the narrative into a completely opposite one or just by forcing it to extremes. Whatever they do it will create division among people even more, but hopefully more people will wake up through that process, if nothing else then when the enemy knocks on their door.

 

[Anthony]

At the moment it looks like they are building the foundation to legally censor all material that is counter to the mainstream.

I had a similar thought when I was looking at a poll taken in Croatian asking people whether they would take a vaccine for Covid-19, the results showed that a large percentage of people would refuse it. The mainstream media then used it to claim that it was a result of the public being irrational, misinformed and not thinking clearly, and partly blamed the antivaxxers. I saw it as a sign that the propaganda was about to be bumped up a notch.

 

[genero81]

I think we have to wait until the elites lose control. I just had a thought that if the media was back in the hands of normal sincere people giving the best, most factual data available, this cognitive dissonance and fear and mistrust would disappear almost immediately. The truth would be clearly recognizable to most everyone.

I've seen this 'hope' many times before; "people are starting to wake up! people are starting to wake up!"

No wait... still asleep as ever. Or at best, generally confused. I'm afraid there won't be any positive developments until the psychopaths lose their grip on the world and it populations for real.

 

[whitecoast]

Thanks for the encouraging news JGeropoulas and Anthony. You’d have to be pretty naive about the mainstream institutions or some kind of true believer these days to take everything they say at face value. I’d say the BLM protests being okayed by the so-called experts was a big turning point in the “exposure” the C’s talked about.

 

[axj]

I've seen this 'hope' many times before; "people are starting to wake up! people are starting to wake up!"

No wait... still asleep as ever.

I think there is some legitimacy to the view that more people have been waking up. Trump's election would have been impossible if most people were just asleep and trusting the media. People wanted actual change, which he of course could hardly deliver.

 

[edgitarra]

Maybe COVID-19 really is making people wake up!

Maybe maybe not, maybe you're getting this because people are against the same thing you are, but in the end for different reasons altogether. I can see a pattern here - seeing that Anthony was mentioning Croatia, I will also mention Romania - people refuse the vaccine here as well. But why they refuse it? Well the main narrative is that Bill Gates vaccine is actually a 5G chip that is also the mark of the beast.

I hope you get the point.
I am not trying to defend anyone, but the staggering combinations between Bill Gates, 5G, chips and Illuminati are everywhere in the low-key shit type of Romanian media. Websites full of extremely blown up conspiracy theories(like truly shitty ones, [I for myself believe there are very many bad things happening in this world easily disregarded as a conspiracy, but It's not easy to explain how sensational they make those articles] - examples would be - "man dreaming the second arrival of jesus is coming next week!" or "this holy crystal will change your life for 100euros!)"

Romanian Media is full of this type of sensationalist bullshit, and every pensioner or elder that in the last 3-4 years got access to Facebook is reading and sharing and forming all kinds of weird opinions with no real background.

And guess what - Many Romanians think the Covid doesn't even exist. Not even that its a mild virus, its simply doesn't exist! :)) There are news with people going to the church service, and the priest serving all of them during the orthodox ceremony bread with the same spoon. Guess what - all of them got infected and some ended up in ICU's, dying of complications. Whether people die solely of COVID-19 or complications, it is plain stupid to risk oneself because of misinformation.

That is why I say, maybe you got the impression that people are waking up, but they are just refusing something because of some weird really red flaggy narrative that isn't real either. They are not waking up, they are just staying asleep for something else. It's a good accident in the best case scenario, that's all.

 

[melatonin]

The wearing of masks says a lot to me. Seems like psychopaths in power have totally dropped the pretence off caring. Interesting that the minions below are now required to wear a mask. Is it to encourage opinions and beliefs that people would otherwise hide? Right wing ideologies?