The mainstream media..

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Here some nuggets from an article quantifying the decline of the mainstream media as Republicans take in a hefty diet of conspiracy theory waging shock jock ultra right wing radio shock jocks, Fox, and the likes of Breitbart. All of these in a concerted effort to delegitimize the mainstream media:

In 2000, Republicans, Democrats and Independents were all within six percentage points of one another in terms of their trust in the media, ranging from 47 percent to 53 percent. But since that time, figures for both Independents and Republicans have been declining, with Republicans generally declining at a sharper rate. And 2016 saw the steepest drop yet for Republicans, sinking all the way to 14 percent. To understand how this might have happened, it’s helpful to look at the evolution of where Republicans have been consuming their news. Examining the initial declines in 2003-04, you see that those drops happen to coincide with two different, but significant and related events — the first being the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the second being the launch of several hyper-conservative long-form talk radio programs in a compressed period. 

Regional hyper-conservative radio personalities took note and quickly stepped in to fill the void. Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck proved to have impeccable timing as they all launched nationally syndicated programs right before, during or after September 2001. Mark Levin soon followed. These political shock-jocks all seized the moment… extending their arms wide open to pull in a large contingent of listeners who were angry and vulnerable in a confusion-filled post-9/11 world. Their audience ratings soared (even as other radio listeners began returning to old habits), and by 2008, those five had joined Rush as the top six talk radio programs in the entire country (for any and all formats, not just political programs).

Besides a pursuit of higher ratings, these six personalities also shared in common a drive to discredit and marginalize standard news reporting. And with a growing, captive audience of tens of millions of listeners, radio proved to be a perfect medium in a post-9/11 setting to deliver this message and codify a malleable audience. Examples of some of the anti-press approaches include: Limbaugh relentlessly led the initial anti-press charge going back to the 1990s, and has often told his followers to actually not follow mainstream media. Savage often refers to the press as “celentrates” (animals without backbone), and recently told his followers, “The media has done far more damage invading the minds of Americans and others around the world than Putin did in invading Crimea.” Ingraham and Levin repeatedly go after the media with claims of dishonesty, with Ingraham even stating the major news networks and papers are “worse than irrelevant.” Hannity, an informal adviser to President Trump, seems to have taken a co-pilot role with the White House in attacking the media with endless claims of dishonesty and being “fake.”



One of the most interesting discoveries in their data is the finding that in 2016, Breitbart.com (a hyper-conservative website previously run by current White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon) had effectively displaced Foxnews.com as the center of gravity for where most on the right side of the political spectrum consumed political information online. Breitbart — which Bannon described during an interview last summer as the “platform for the alt-right” — is beloved by its readers for producing headlines such as “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield.”

As hyper-conservative media surged, Republicans’ trust in news cratered | TechCrunch