Jeff McCall - Media Studies Professor, DePauw University Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, when it comes to the media, you know, if
we're kicking them this morning, we're kicking them when they're down.
I don't know how much lower trust in the media
can go before it hits zero. Not much lower before
it hit zero. Jeff Buncall joins us Many, a studies
professor to Paul University, and I feel like you and
I have a broken record conversation about this, Jeff, because
every time we talk, the number of poll numbers for

(00:20):
mainstream media have gone down even further, and yet as usual,
we see absolutely no change in the way they're doing business.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, you know, when you get right down to it,
I think we could look at the establishment news media
and by now conclude that they are absolutely oblivious to
the problems that they've created for themselves. And when you
get right down to it, when you look at the
Gallop polling, which is the poll that you're referring to,
you know, trust in the media has declined to twenty
eight percent. And if you look at that in perspective,

(00:52):
in the late seventies, trust in the media was well
into the seventy percent range, and it started to line
in the late seventies and into the eighties and nineties,
but by two thousand and four, the percentage of people
who trusted the media had fallen below fifty percent, and
it continues to fall. But we don't see any change
in how the mainstream media goes about their business. And

(01:15):
so the American people are speaking through this poll that
the news industry is not listening. They have not figured
out that their agenda for news doesn't match the agenda
of the American people, and they've not figured out that
when they try to be activist and advocacy, that the
American public is not interested in that. The American public

(01:36):
is interested in having a news media that provides them
some facts and then lets the news. Let's the American
public decide what's important. You know, when you get right
down to it, you think about you know, George Stephanopolis
is the leading political reporter for ABC News. Everybody knows
that he's a partisan, And so why would you tune
the ABC to get political news knowing that it's run

(01:58):
by a guy who is absolutely partisan? And would you
tune into CBS to hear Gail King in the morning
try to provide objective news. And nobody trusts the New
York Times of the Washington Posts. They're clearly advocacy organizations.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
And even the.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Associated Press, which for years had a great reputation, is
now viewed as a left of center news outlet by
the All Sides Media polling firm. And so the evidence
is conclusive across the board that the news media has
become advocacy based and the public doesn't want it. But
the news industry goes along their happy path destroying themselves,

(02:36):
and it's really not helpful for our democracy or for
informing people, because people are not going to tune into
the media if they don't trust it.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Jeff Pacall, let me ask you, do we break it
down any further though you mentioned NBC or ABC or CBS.
You know, we always know that they're part of the
mainstream media. Who else is a part of that mainstream
media we don't trust? There? Is there any part of
the national media I'll use a different term, national media
that generally people do find trustworthy. For example, do they
separate Fox News from ABC News? Well?

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Fox News is of course listed in the All Sides
Media ratings as a right center organization, But I think
we probably when we look at Fox News, we need
to consider their news programming which would be Brett Bair
and Martha McCallum and people like that versus their opinion shows.
And I think a lot of the Fox reputation comes
from the people in the Evening like Jesse Waters and

(03:27):
Laura Ingram, who are partisan obviously, and they're coming from
a right of center perspective. But there are some news
organizations that get pretty good ratings in terms of fairness.
One of those is Interestingly News Nation, which is a
cable company but doesn't seem to get a lot of
traction lately. And also there's a news organization called The Hill,

(03:48):
which is Washington, DC based political news and all disclosure
here I am a writer for The Hill, but The
Hill gets very good analysis in terms of ratings from
bias bias ratings. Also, there's a news wire service called
Reuter's which is generally considered to be pretty fair. So
there are some fair ones out there, but the mainstream

(04:10):
ones and the ones that are the highest profile that
I think the people in the Gallup poll are responding
to are the ones that have just dug in their
heels and continue to be activists. And the problem here
is that they continue to hire people who are just
like them. They have not expanded their range of employment
to hire some people who come in to the CNN

(04:32):
newsroom and maybe don't think like all the people there,
So they've really got groupthink going on in these newsrooms,
and it's very, very sad for them, because the drift
is that people will stop consuming news altogether and become
news bystanders, which is even worse for the nation.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
I write, and then Lord knows where they're getting their
information from, because any other other sources such as the
Internet and you know, only in social media can be
just as biased. Jeff, Thank you appreciated. Jeff McCall, media
studies professor at De Paul University. It's five fifty seven