Americans Speak Out Loud and Clear: Media Completely Out of Touch
The “fake news” media has attempted to blame the palpable mistrust toward them on the recent political rise and rhetoric of President Donald Trump. However, there has long been a sense among the average American citizen that the predominately liberal media is largely out-of-touch with regard to their desires and needs, and completely oblivious to their personal motivations and feelings about various cultural and societal issues.
The aloofness of the media has been readily apparent for decades, from the dismissive manner in which they refer to the heartland of the nation as “flyover country” — as if there is no reason at all to ever stop there — to the manner in which they breathlessly report the goings-on in their cloistered urban dens on the coasts — as if the rest of us in “flyover country” really care that much about the gossip and inner workings of New York City and Washington D.C.
Much of the liberal media live in their own sequestered bubble and have little to no idea what the regular people outside of those bubbles actually believe or think — nor do they even seem to care, most of the time — and now that great disconnect has been quantified by polling analysis from the Pew Research Center.
After first collecting data between February and March of 2018 and analyzing it for nearly a year, the Pew researchers finally revealed that a significant majority of the American people — 58 percent — feel like the media simply don’t understand people like them, while only 40 percent do feel like they are fully understood by the media.
Unsurprisingly, the feeling of being misunderstood by the media was far higher among Republicans than Democrats, given the increasingly blatant leftward partisanship and display of ideological leanings by many in the media these days.
According to Pew, roughly 73 percent of Republicans feel that the major news organizations don’t understand them, with a mere 25 percent of Republicans saying they think the media does understand them.
Interestingly, that feeling of being misunderstood by the media seemed to echo across the Republican landscape regardless of the respondent’s level of interest in the news, not to mention their age, education level or gender.
To wit, among Republicans who described themselves as “very interested” in the news, the margin was 74-24 percent in favor of feeling misunderstood. Among those who said they were only “somewhat interested” in the news, the margin was 70-28 misunderstood, while the biggest split came from those who were “not interested” at all, who similarly felt misunderstood by a margin of 78-21 percent.
Republican males said they were misunderstood by the media at a rate of 75 percent, while 72 percent of Republican females said the same. Some 75 percent of Republicans over the age of 50 felt misunderstood by the media, while 71 percent of Republicans aged 18-49 felt the same way.
Indeed, the least misunderstood segment of the Republican respondents were those who had “some college” education, but even 70 percent of them said the media didn’t fully understand them.
Things were a little better for the media when it came to Democrats, but really not by much. Overall, 58 percent of Democrats felt that the media understood them, while only 40 percent felt misunderstood.
However, that number was likely bolstered by the Democrat respondents who professed to be “very interested” or “somewhat interested” in the news — 71-27 percent and 58-39 percent, respectively — which isn’t surprising, given the aforementioned evident liberal bias of the media. The contrast showed among Democrats who were “not interested” in the news, as only 45 percent said they felt understood while 52 percent claimed to feel misunderstood by the media.
One final note from the Democratic numbers in this study that should be a cause for concern among the media is that 44 percent of Democrats aged 18-49 feel misunderstood, as do 47 percent of Democrats with a high school education or less.
Those two figures signal two separate things: First, the young progressives on the left feel they have been overlooked by the media, while the average working-class Democrats with little education feel snubbed by the coastal elitist pundits and talking heads who read the news every day.
To be sure, these figures don’t really reveal anything new, but merely put a quantifiable number on something that a majority of Americans have instinctively felt for some time.
It would behoove members of the liberal media to escape their cloistered liberal coastal bubbles from time to time and actually speak with and develop a better understanding of the hundreds of millions of Americans who consume their news.
Maybe seeing their aloofness to the people laid out in this Pew study will help encourage that, but we aren’t holding our breath and will continue to take the media’s biased reports aimed at the small segment of the population who agree with them with a grain of salt in the meantime.
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