Mass Apathy

An interesting study released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on the 13th of September details public opinion on the news-gathering and -presenting media in the United States.

Perhaps not so surprising is one of the first numbers indicated in the release, which is that only 29% of people think the news media generally get the facts correct. The numbers also show that high numbers (over 60%) of both Republicans and Democrats think the media favor one side (presumably, since criticism of the media is on the rise, the other side).

However, even though confidence in the media is so low, surprisingly high percentages of people expressed favorable opinions of particular media outlets - 60% said they had favorable opinions of CNN (44% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats), while 55% had favorable opinions of Fox News (72% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats).

It would seem, then, that a classic move is being made here: People are, in general, saying, "Yes, I know that the news media in general get facts wrong and tend to be biased - but I know this and am not drawn in by it, I am watching the right station for news." This move is precisely one of the ways in which ideology continues to function. That is to say, by stating that we are aware of the inadequacy of the news media, we put some distance between ourselves and it - and it is in this space that ideology functions, as it is filtered through the empty space.

Even though the statement is made that we don't necessarily believe what the media tell us, somewhere around 70% of people still get their news primarily from national media networks. This is, in part - in my non-expert opinion - because the national media networks are where narrativization primarily occurs. It is where a coherent narrative is formed nearly instantaneously as things happen, and it is the narrative that generally gets remembered (unless some future narrativization is allowed to go back and rewrite history).

In sum, there is one important and depressing point to take from this, if nothing else: the fact that most people believe the media generally get the facts wrong and about the same amount of people still choose to get their news from the same outlets (it is about 71% of people in both cases) says that Americans, in general, do not expect truth from the media. We expect fiction and entertainment. We expect excitement, not "truthiness." We do not expect news. This can mean, really, only one thing - that we simply do not care.

-the ambassador