Philip Crump, soon to be appointed as a representative on NZME’s new editorial board, puts forward in ‘Cranmer’s Substack’ a number of reasons why trust in the mainstream media is declining:
1. Emphasising Narrative over Factual Reporting
2. Abandoning Balance for Editorial Advocacy
3. Shaping Discourse through Editorial Gatekeeping
4. Prioritising Sensationalism to Chase Engagement
5. Manipulating Perceptions with Loaded Language
6. Reinforcing Narratives with Selective Experts and Anonymous Sources.
Whilst these reasons are indeed compelling, I suggest there is something more fundamental behind this loss of trust across Western society that might be explained as follows.
Examine the development of organised religion as an example, where the faiths of Catholicism, Islam and Judaism centralised doctrinal power among their acolytes by positing one creed and one version of God.
Then, as the masses to whom this opiate was being administered became more educated, the Protestant response developed, decentralising doctrinal power to the point where every man became free to pursue his own version of religion and idea of God.
Or, as the philosopher Epictetus commented in the first century AD, “All religions must be tolerated for every man must get to heaven in his own way.”
Today the secular world offers a parallel: the fragmentation of the media scene and the underlying reason why public trust in the MSM continues to decline.
When each individual can find echo chambers within social and specialised media to feedback and reinforce their own ideas, such ideas become more and more entrenched to the point where only the media sources that reflect those personal beliefs are considered by that individual to be reliable purveyors of ‘the truth’.
Each individual becomes their own unique ‘news receptacle’, displaying antipathy towards any published commentary perceived to be in opposition to their established preconceptions, and so we see trust in the MSM continuing to decline.
Of course, given the left-wing proclivities of the great majority of NZ journalists, their output will, by definition, antagonise at least 53 per cent of the Kiwi voting population who were right of centre at the last election.
But even so, given the broad sweep of what is reported, the MSM cannot possibly satisfy all of the people all of the time.
Ergo, some of what is published by any outlet must, at some point, conflict with someone’s beliefs and so negative opinion forms drip by drip, one individual at a time: ‘If the media is wrong on this they must be wrong on other things too, so in general I, personally, would say they’re not to be trusted.’
In summary, as every individual becomes convinced of the rightness of their own ideologies; the audience for news becomes more and more fragmented to the point where it impossible for the purveyors of that news not to offend some individual at some time, no matter what they report.
Consequently, dislike of whatever media outlet has caused that offence festers until all media is considered to be tainted, and this is the reason for declining trust in ‘The Media’ across NZ and the Western world in general.
Pursuing this to its logical conclusion, since every news outlet must at some point offend someone, trust in ‘The Media’ will eventually decline to zero.
And so to the end point, with everyone pursuing their own version of reality and their own political ideas: a bedlam of countless voices is raised in the public square, each shouting across the other, leading inevitably to the worst of all possible worlds, where all news is considered to be ‘fake news’.
There’s much truth, then, in the claim “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
2. Abandoning Balance for Editorial Advocacy
3. Shaping Discourse through Editorial Gatekeeping
4. Prioritising Sensationalism to Chase Engagement
5. Manipulating Perceptions with Loaded Language
6. Reinforcing Narratives with Selective Experts and Anonymous Sources.
Whilst these reasons are indeed compelling, I suggest there is something more fundamental behind this loss of trust across Western society that might be explained as follows.
Examine the development of organised religion as an example, where the faiths of Catholicism, Islam and Judaism centralised doctrinal power among their acolytes by positing one creed and one version of God.
Then, as the masses to whom this opiate was being administered became more educated, the Protestant response developed, decentralising doctrinal power to the point where every man became free to pursue his own version of religion and idea of God.
Or, as the philosopher Epictetus commented in the first century AD, “All religions must be tolerated for every man must get to heaven in his own way.”
Today the secular world offers a parallel: the fragmentation of the media scene and the underlying reason why public trust in the MSM continues to decline.
When each individual can find echo chambers within social and specialised media to feedback and reinforce their own ideas, such ideas become more and more entrenched to the point where only the media sources that reflect those personal beliefs are considered by that individual to be reliable purveyors of ‘the truth’.
Each individual becomes their own unique ‘news receptacle’, displaying antipathy towards any published commentary perceived to be in opposition to their established preconceptions, and so we see trust in the MSM continuing to decline.
Of course, given the left-wing proclivities of the great majority of NZ journalists, their output will, by definition, antagonise at least 53 per cent of the Kiwi voting population who were right of centre at the last election.
But even so, given the broad sweep of what is reported, the MSM cannot possibly satisfy all of the people all of the time.
Ergo, some of what is published by any outlet must, at some point, conflict with someone’s beliefs and so negative opinion forms drip by drip, one individual at a time: ‘If the media is wrong on this they must be wrong on other things too, so in general I, personally, would say they’re not to be trusted.’
In summary, as every individual becomes convinced of the rightness of their own ideologies; the audience for news becomes more and more fragmented to the point where it impossible for the purveyors of that news not to offend some individual at some time, no matter what they report.
Consequently, dislike of whatever media outlet has caused that offence festers until all media is considered to be tainted, and this is the reason for declining trust in ‘The Media’ across NZ and the Western world in general.
Pursuing this to its logical conclusion, since every news outlet must at some point offend someone, trust in ‘The Media’ will eventually decline to zero.
And so to the end point, with everyone pursuing their own version of reality and their own political ideas: a bedlam of countless voices is raised in the public square, each shouting across the other, leading inevitably to the worst of all possible worlds, where all news is considered to be ‘fake news’.
There’s much truth, then, in the claim “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
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