“We are not fake news, we are not failing news organizations and we are not the enemy of the American people,” said Jeff Mason, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Those remarks from Mason drew thunderous applause from D.C.’s elite at the association’s annual hobnob dinner that features the who’s who from this town.
Well, I don’t think the press is the enemy of the American people; years of neglect and condescending reports about the rural areas of the country have left that feeling in the minds of the millions of people who live here. Moreover, the news media’s shameless liberal bias, among other things, has earned the institution low marks with Americans. In a Morning Consult poll, more Americans trust the White House more when it comes to telling the truth than the news media. Moreover, 51 percent feel that the press is out of touch with Americans:
In the new poll, roughly half (51 percent) of Americans said the national political media “is out of touch with everyday Americans,” compared with 28 percent who said it “understand the issues everyday Americans are facing.”President Donald Trump, a frequent public antagonist of the press and the first president in 36 years to skip the confab, is also slightly more trusted than the national political media. Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they trusted Trump’s White House to tell the truth, while 29 percent opted for the media.
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The dinner itself is not at the top of Americans’ minds. Three in five voters said they hadn’t heard much or anything at all about it, and just 13 percent had heard a lot.
The national, online survey of 2,006 adults was conducted April 25-26 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Some have called it the revenge of the white working class voter, but maybe—to play off the language of the urban elite—it’s better to say that it was the country bumpkin rebellion. The loss of factories (and its impacts on local communities), the impact of trade deals, and now the spiraling opioid crisis would often be ignored by the news media. They still don’t get it. Even after Trump won, The New York Times had a headline that seemed to reflect the disappointment of the newspaper’s friends and allies about the 2016 results more than what actually happened. The people voted for change. Period. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and NBC News’ Mark Halperin ripped the Times for this out of touch spectacle.
It’s been a while and it’ll be a while.
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