by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
September 29, 2004
a recent Gallup Poll on the credibility of the news media showed a sharp decline in respondents’ trust in the accuracy of the news that they are receiving. The poll was taken between September 13 and September 15, closely after questions were raised about CBS’s documentation of George W. Bush’s National Guard service but before CBS apologized for what was unquestionably a forged document.
although Gallup says the connection between the drop in trust and the CBS scandal is purely speculative, Rathergate could not have helped the situation.
The percentage of americans who have confidence in the media’s accurate reportage of the news was 44 percent, with only 9 percent of respondents indicating that they had a great deal of confidence in the news that they are getting. The 44 percent was an entire 10 percent drop from the results that were obtained only one year ago.
Gallup had also factored the fact that this year is an election year and that Republicans are the most likely to distrust the media. The number of people who had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media and who described themselves as Republicans fell by 13 percent from the previous year. While Republicans showed the greatest decline in finding the media credible, the percentage fell 9 percent for those who described themselves as Independents and 7 percent for Democrats. Gallup pointed out that while Republicans had the least trust in the media to begin with and declined the most, there was a significant drop in confidence from the previous year in all three groups.
The conclusion to be drawn from the poll is that decline in people’s trust of the media is not limited to those who are partisan conservatives’ the ones that are always saying that there is a significant left wing bias in the media. all americans are showing significantly less trust in the news media than they had in 2003.
There is no doubt that had CBS acknowledged problems with their documentation when questions about its legitimacy were first raised about whether it could have been produce on a 1970s typewriter, perhaps the public’s confidence levels would not have declined so sharply. But Dan Rather’s and CBS’s refusal to acknowledge the problem and promptly apologize, took the incident out of the realm of simply being a campaign issue.
There will undoubtedly be serious fallout from this incident long after the 2004 election is relegated to the history books.