Former CBS news correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, author of The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think and How You Vote, at the National Press Club Headliners Book Event in Washington, D.C., on August 31, 2017. Cheriss May/ Press Association. All rights reserved.
Journalists naturally resent Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on their profession, and they blame him for undermining public trust in the press. Their credibility, however, had actually eroded away well before Trump announced his run for president. According to the Gallup Poll, only 32 percent of Americans in 2016 had confidence in the media. That was down from a high of 72 percent in 1976, after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein blew open the Watergate story.
Among millennials (18-to-29-year-olds), just 11 percent trust the media. Trump did not cause this distrust, but he certainly benefitted from it. At the start of his presidential campaign, a Rasmussen poll found that 47 percent of likely American voters thought the media was biased against him, whereas just 23 percent thought it was slanted against Hillary Clinton, and fully 71 percent said that reporters abandoned objectivity to help candidates they personally favored. So it didn’t matter what the papers said about Trump, because audiences no longer trusted them. So it didn’t matter what the papers said about Trump, because audiences no longer trusted them.
