Ed Morrissey:
Over the last three months, the national news media has become obsessed with the idea that Donald Trump’s voters are just about ready to abandon him, despite an utter lack of evidence for that narrative. Perhaps they should have been looking after their readers and viewers. A new Morning Consult-Politico poll on public trust shows that only 29% of Americans trust political media to tell them the truth. Guess who scores eight points better?
As political journalists prepare to gather at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday to celebrate their work, a new Morning Consult poll is likely to make many of them cringe.
In the new poll, roughly half (51 percent) of Americans said the national political media “is out of touch with everyday Americans,” compared with 28 percent who said it “understand the issues everyday Americans are facing.”
President Donald Trump, a frequent public antagonist of the press and the first president in 36 years to skip the confab, is also slightly more trusted than the national political media. Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they trusted Trump’s White House to tell the truth, while 29 percent opted for the media.
Eight points isn’t exactly “slightly.” And while this outcome has definite partisan influence, the fact that a Republican president can overcome the normal lean toward Democrats (in this case, only D+1) still says something about the eight-point difference. And even among Democrats, the numbers hardly constitute an endorsement:
Note that this question is framed as a binary: which do you trust more? Thirty-four percent of Democrats can’t answer that question when one of the options is Donald Trump. Only slightly more than half of Democrats commit to trusting the media more, and twelve percent trust the White House, slightly less than the 10% of Republicans who trust the national media more with the truth. Among independents, the results get closer to a wash, but the White House still has the edge at 28/25.
A few other surprises pop out from the demographics.
I wonder when liberals realize hearing only what they want to hear is only temporary joy? You’d think they would have learned that last November.