Donald Trump’s win in November caused seismic waves across the country, and it shook up more than just politics. It served as a clear wakeup call to legacy media outlets.
“They’re doing soul searching, and I think it’s going to be reflected in some of the content we see on the air and on websites and in newspapers,” says veteran journalist Howard Polskin who now reports on the media. “I think everyone is going to be a lot more measured.”
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MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski quickly saw the writing on the wall. “They are overseeing a sinking ship,” says Curtis Houck with Newsbusters. “Joe and Mika, you could think of as the captains of the USS Resistance.”
After being vocal Trump critics, they met with the president-elect at Mar-a Lago and are now starting to play nice as they made clear recently on the broadcast. “Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different,” Brezinski told viewers. “That starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.”
The move by Joe and Mika makes sense based on ratings alone. Following the election, MSNBC’s total viewership dropped 38% and CNN is down 27%.
Houck sees this as desperate times. “Part of that desperation is going to meet with the ‘fascist’ himself,” Houck tells CBN News. “And they’ve admitted in previous weeks that they want to do the show differently, which I take that to mean, perhaps go back to the Morning Joe that it used to be.”
But it might be too late to do any good. Trust in the media has been fading for years. Back in 1972, only 6% of Americans said they didn’t trust the media. By the Clinton years in 1997, that number increased to 15%. When Trump first took office, it jumped to 24% and now, eight years later, 36% of Americans don’t trust the media at all.
“That is such an extraordinary number, and it should be a shock wave in newsrooms across this country,” says John Solomon, the CEO of Just The News. “Unfortunately, most newsrooms are still in denial…so I fear the pattern of misreporting, of loss of audience, loss of connection with audience, loss of perspective with audience, is going to continue.”
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Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.
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