The Conservative Alienation from Journalism

[Commentary] Coverage of the Pew Research Center’s latest study has emphasized the finding that news consumption has become more polarized, each of us preferring All the News that Fits Our Worldview. But to me the most interesting finding was different: the deep alienation of conservatives from mainstream media and “journalism.”

Get this: among the 36 outlets they studied, there was only one -- The Wall Street Journal -- that had positive levels of trust among both consistently liberal and consistently conservative Americans. This was not because of ideological polarization (liberals trust plenty of outlets). It is because conservatives trust so few. Not surprisingly, they mistrust MSNBC and Mother Jones. But they also mistrust ABC News, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Hell, they even discount Bloomberg, USA Today, PBS and Yahoo News.

[Waldman is author of the landmark report on the changing media landscape produced by the Federal Communications Commission]