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JULY 10, 2022

GETTING LOWER THAN THE TITANIC:  Gallup tells the news industry exactly where it rates with the American people.  This is not a valentine.  From Newsbusters: 

The American people's trust in news outlets has hit a historic low, according to Gallup’s annual survey on confidence in major U.S. institutions. It's like they've discovered that "straight news" isn't their primary goal.

Both newspapers and television news have seen another drop in confidence over the past year, with each losing an average five percent of people who said they had a “great deal” of trust in such institutions. Gallup has been measuring "confidence in institutions" since 1973, and annually since 1993.

Television news is now considered the second least-trusted institution in America, after Congress, with just 11 percent of respondents telling Gallup they have “quite a lot” of trust in television news. Newspapers aren't much better at 16 percent.

On Twitter, Glenn Greenwald noted Democrats trust the media far more than the Republicans and independents because "everyone knows what side they're on."

One might think the Democrats would muster a majority to endorse the credibility of the liberal media. But they end up being hostile to the liberal media for not being liberal enough. Liberal Twitter spends a lot of time demanding TV hosts like Chuck Todd be fired for being too negative to the Democrats.

Remember these dismal credibility ratings when reporters try to suggest that someone else (even Biden) is in the polling dumpster. Reporters have a bad habit of skipping over their own approval ratings.

COMMENT:  The credibility problem in journalism didn't start yesterday.  There's really no clear "start date," but I do think many of the current problems began after President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.  The combination of the media's intense dislike for President Lyndon Johnson, the rebellious nature of the sixties, the contempt for the Vietnam war, the introduction of a new generation of college "educated" journalists, were part of the witches' brew.  The whole story is much more complicated, but you see where we are.

July 10, 2022       Permalink

JULY 9, 2022

THE UNSTABLE PRESIDENT:  It is obvious to everyone, including the people in the White House.  The president is deteriorating.  Badly.   And the truth can't be held back.  We may well be approaching a crisis point in the Biden administration.  And we don't have much of a vice president to fall back on.  From Fox: 

The New York Times published a stunning report about President Biden's age and how it's becoming an "uncomfortable issue" for the White House and the Democratic Party. 

The headline of the report on Saturday declared that 79-year-old Biden is "testing the boundaries of age and the presidency," first highlighting how his upcoming trip to the Middle East was initially tacked onto his recent trip to Europe with one anonymous official calling it "crazy" if the president had done a 10-day trip overseas, those aides tell the Times there were "political and diplomatic" reasons behind separating the trip into two. 

"But the reality is that managing the schedule of the oldest president in American history presents distinct challenges," Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote. "And as Mr. Biden insists he plans to run for a second term, his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party."

Baker recapped from Biden's European trip how he needed guidance from another world leader to look at the cameras for a photo-op and how now-outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson answered a question on behalf of the president, who didn't hear a reporter shouting a question about Ukraine. 

"At times, Mr. Biden kept a packed schedule. On the day he flew to Madrid for a NATO summit, he met with multiple leaders and finished with a dinner hosted by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain. On another day, though, he skipped evening festivities with other leaders, and his public schedule finished with a 3:30 p.m. event," Baker wrote. "But aides said he was busy and stayed up working late each night of the trip out of view — just as they say they expect him to in the coming week as he hits the road again in Israel and Saudi Arabia."

Baker wrote that Biden's age has become "a sensitive topic in the West Wing," noting that he is already one year older than President Reagan was when he finished his second term. He alleged "more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly reported that Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and rewriting speeches like his abortion statement on Friday right up until the last minute."

COMMENT:  My own sense is that one reason for Mr. Biden's low approval rating is that many people don't feel comfortable around a leader who stumbles and stammers.  They might not ask it outright, but surely many Americans wonder if this president can lead the nation through a crisis.  You just can't feel comfortable with a president who, at times, doesn't seem "all there."  And yet, journalists don't seem ready to confront the questions.

July 9, 2022     Permalink