These numbers suggest quite a shift in what Americans want from their news. A generation ago Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in the country because of his neutrality. Now people trust Fox the most precisely because of its lack of neutrality. It says a lot about where journalism is headed.
There's a great documentary that I'd recommend that talks a lot about FoxNews and how it's cornered a lot of markets and gotten to be so popular, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. FoxNews makes me mad because I don't think that it does endorse democracy or dialogue. It's about shouting down your opponent, no matter how ignorant you may be, and dominating the other side. There is no desire to work together, and they're critical of anything they disagree with and play the "un-Amercan" card.
I get my news from NPR, which from my perspective is balanced based on the facts that it gives. Now, there is certainly slant, but the way it slants is by what it chooses to cover, not by the words it says in that coverage. I remember that clicking in high school when they were doing a piece about New Jersey prison conditions. They weren't slamming the New Jersey government, they were raising an issue that was critical of the entirety of government and a systemic problem in government. I realized that I would probably never hear that on Sean Hannity's show (to which I listened every day). Somewhere between then and now I've decided that I want news to be left-leaning, and not because I'm left -leaning. If news is going to spout party line or official statements from the government and get all riled up when people (exercise constitutional right/duty to) petition the government and then call them "un-Amercan" for doing so, what's the point of having a free press? I don't think the founders wanted any people but official spokespeople serving as government/party mouthpieces, or we wouldn't have the freedom of the press in the First Amendment.
Additionally, I check out BBC for news. Contrary to what most Americans believe, we aren't the center of the universe, we operate as part of an international community, and what we do at home and abroad affects us at home and how we're treated abroad. Even our most left-leaning news organizations are horribly myopic when it comes to international coverage. I've also decided to start reading Le Monde both to work on my French and to get yet another perspective on what's happening around the world and in the United States. I've also started to take in a smattering of DemocracyNow! but (maybe because I'm so caught up in what Ethan calls "corporate news") despite how much I want to believe it, I have to take it with a grain of salt.
Where do you get your news?
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