A new Survey Monkey poll from the website Axios shows the overwhelming majority of Americans (70 percent) believe that “traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading.” This goes far beyond the voters who approve of Trump’s performance as president.
A majority of Republicans (92 percent), independents (79 percent), and even Democrats (53 percent) agreed that "traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading” “a lot” or at least “sometimes.”
Axios blamed Trump for the high GOP number. He "exacerbated the skepticism of hardline conservatives with polarizing language (and tweets) about the mainstream media being 'fake news.'"
This result makes sense at a time that Time magazine puts out a fake cover of a child NOT separated from her mother to illustrate children removed from their mothers, and the editor, Edward Felsenthal, defended the image as "iconic" regardless of the facts surrounding it. Most say that fake news comes from an agenda:
More than two-thirds (65%) say fake news is usually reported because “people have an agenda.”
Roughly one-third (30%) believe such information is shared due to laziness or “poor fact-checking.”
Hardly anyone (3%) thinks that fake news makes headlines by accident.
Most people say they can spot a fake piece of news. And while Republicans are much less likely to trust that traditional news sources publish real news, they and Democrats are both mostly confident, 78% and 73% respectively, in their ability to identify whether a piece of news as fake.
Media reporter Joe Concha retweeted author and business strategist Carol Roth's take on the age we live in: "This is what happens when too many journalists want to be pundits, and no clear delineation is made by the media between the two..."
In April, a Pew Research Center survey found "Fewer than half in both parties also say news organizations do not favor one political party, though Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say this describes the country well (38% vs. 18%)." In other words, 82 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats think the news is partisan.
