Trump Losing Fights With Media, But Far Too Many Believe Him

Public Policy Polling reports, Trump Badly Losing His Fights With Media, but their findings do show that the news media, and reality, are doing far less well than they should. From their findings:

PPP’s newest national poll finds that Donald Trump is losing all of his fights with the media- and voters really think he needs to reduce his cable news consumption.

62% of voters nationally think Trump should keep his cable watching to less than an hour a day, and 82% think he needs to keep it under 2 hours a day. Just 6% of voters in the country think it’s a good idea for Trump to spend more than 2 hours a day watching cable news.

Last week Trump declared that the news media was the ‘enemy of the American people’ but we find that only 35% of voters believe that, to 53% who say that isn’t the case. By a 48/44 spread they say it is actually Trump who is the greater threat to the American people than the media. We asked voters who they thought had more credibility between Trump and each of the outlets he singled out for attack last week, and Trump loses out to every one of them by double digits.

They put up various media outlets in head to head polls against Donald Trump. The New York Time came out the best, beating Trump by a 52 to 40 percent margin. NBC, CNN, ABC, and CBS came out just slightly less well, beating Trump by ten to eleven points.

They also reported that, “We also in general find that voters find the media outlets Trump considers hostile to him credible, while it finds the outlets more friendly to him less credible.” They compared the number seeing each media outlet as credible versus not credible and reported net credibility. The New York Times and the major network news had net credibility ranging from 19 to 25. CNN lagged behind at 15 but still was seen far better than Fox, which had a positive net credibility at 6. Daily Caller, Info Wars and Breitbart had negative net credibility ranging from negative 31 to negative 36.

To a pollster’s mind this would be a big victory, but we are not looking at general election polling. In a general election, a win of ten points or more would be a landslide. While we saw how a three point victory was not enough for Clinton to win in the Electoral College, there is no question she would have had a large victory in the electoral college if she could have achieved a ten point victory.

However, this is not a general election poll. I still find it discouraging that in a question of who is more credible, Donald Trump, who has lied every day since taking office, is seen as more credible than major media outlets by forty percent of those polled. At least the more mainstream media was seen as more credible than the right wing sources which do intentionally spread misinformation.

This is not to say that the media doesn’t have its faults. CNN, for example, concentrates on star power over in depth coverage. They spend a tremendous amount of time with talking heads trying to tell people what they should think as opposed to giving the facts. Despite these faults, their errors in fact are rare compared to the constant deluge of alternative facts spread by Donald Trump and his administration. It is valid to complain that CNN presents superficial coverage and biased opinions. That is not the same as being “fake news.”

Donald Trump has received considerable well-deserved criticism for his attacks on the news media, including calling the media the”enemy of the American people.” Trump continued to attack the media at CPAC today, including a threat that “we’re going to do something about it.” He claimed that he was only attacking “fake” news, but his attacks have included many mainstream media outlets. He bases his attacks on coverage which is negative towards him as opposed to opposing news which is actually fake.

The Trump administration has also been packing the press briefings and his new conference with friendly newspapers and blogs and primarily taking questions from these sources. They have escalated this in blocking news media they see as unfriendly to them from covering today’s briefing. The Hill reports:

Spicer decided to hold an off-camera “gaggle” with reporters inside his West Wing office instead of the traditional on-camera briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.

Among the outlets not permitted to cover the gaggle were news organizations President Trump has singled out for criticism, including CNN.

The New York Times, The Hill, Politico, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, BBC, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News were among the other news organizations not permitted to attend.