{"id":26742,"date":"2021-02-04T16:41:37","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T16:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/for-profit-cable-news-misinformation-trump-cnn\/"},"modified":"2021-02-04T16:43:07","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T16:43:07","slug":"if-youre-worried-about-misinformation-focus-on-for-profit-tv-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/04\/if-youre-worried-about-misinformation-focus-on-for-profit-tv-news\/","title":{"rendered":"If You\u2019re Worried About Misinformation, Focus on For-Profit TV News"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Believe it or not, the data all point to television, not social media, as the most powerful reality-warping medium for most Americans. Unsurprisingly, that is not the impression you\u2019d get from listening to the cable news\u2013driven discourse on the subject.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe<\/cite>. (Flickr)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Question: What is the most powerful news medium in the world today?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve even casually followed the news the past four years, the answer seems obvious: social media and the Web.<\/p>\n

After all, as we\u2019ve heard again<\/a> and again<\/a>, it was Silicon Valley<\/a> that was responsible<\/a> for Trump\u2019s shock 2016 victory, thanks to<\/a> a foul cocktail of fake news, bots, memes, and so on. In fact, social media, we\u2019ve been repeatedly told, is the cause of just about everything<\/a> good, bad, or in between that\u2019s happened in recent years, from Brexit<\/a> and unrest in Hong Kong<\/a> to opposition to fracking<\/a> and protests against police brutality<\/a>. Tech CEOs have been repeatedly<\/a> summoned<\/a> to Congress and dressed down<\/a>, pushing them into ever-intensifying efforts to censor content on their platforms. And of course, it\u2019s social media that\u2019s to blame for the Capitol riot last month, as various<\/a> critics<\/a> across<\/a> the political<\/a> spectrum<\/a> have told us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Naturally, the solutions lie with the cause. Twitter, identified<\/a> as the reason for Trump\u2019s entire political career, finally banned him from its platform, along with purging tens of thousands of other right-wing users<\/a>. At the urging of experts<\/a>, the president plans to pressure tech companies<\/a> to more tightly censor what their users post. Cable news personalities like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have demanded<\/a> that Facebook be \u201cshut down\u201d for having \u201cdestroyed this country\u201d and \u201cdemocracies across the globe,\u201d while media outlets float new targets for suppression, like podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The inescapable takeaway is that the average person is falling behind the breakneck pace of technological change, which is reshaping the world in dark, malevolent ways: \u201cAmplifying the lobotomized, the intellectual cornering of people, so that they cannot learn what\u2019s really happening, so that their worst fears and their worst concerns are amplified,\u201d in the words of a former Facebook executive.<\/p>\n

Except, what if none of this was true? Or rather, what if it was <\/em>true, but about a completely different medium?<\/p>\n

That medium is television. As of 2019, 53 percent<\/a> of Americans got their political news primarily through local, network, and cable television, compared to the 18 percent who did so through social media. This was little changed from 2016, arguably the high point of social media\u2013related panic, when a Stanford survey<\/a> found network, cable, and local TV were three of the four most commonly cited \u201cmost important\u201d sources of news and information about that year\u2019s election (social media was for only 14 percent of US adults). According to a Pew survey<\/a> from that year, while only 18 percent said they \u201coften\u201d get news from social media, that figure was 46, 31, and 30 percent for local, cable, and network TV, respectively.<\/p>\n

Crucially, television is also still the most trusted <\/em>source of news for millions of people. A Pew survey<\/a> carried out at the end of 2019 found huge majorities upward of 65 percent of Democrats, liberals, Republicans, and conservatives trusted CNN and Fox News, depending on their ideology and partisan leaning, with similarly large majorities of liberals and Democrats putting their faith in outlets like NBC, ABC, CBS, as well as NPR and PBS. These numbers were similar \u2014 higher, even, when it came to Democrats \u2014 in a Morning Consult poll<\/a> conducted in April 2020. People\u2019s distrust of social media, meanwhile, has only increased: the most recent Pew research<\/a> found 59 percent of social media news consumers expect the news they see on platforms to be \u201clargely inaccurate,\u201d a rise of two points from 2018.<\/p>\n

You didn\u2019t need polls to tell you this. Pry apart the tangled mass of four years of alarmist news, and you might\u2019ve seen that the evidence for social media\u2019s brainwashing powers was pretty thin. Here\u2019s just a brief roundup of the data-driven findings of \u201cfake news\u201d on social media:<\/p>\n