The New York Times is testing a pretty desperate excuse for Donald Trump’s stubborn approval ratings, which aren’t awful, despite the unanimity of mainstream media against him. Cue the sneers about “lower-information voters”!
The online headline encapsulated the main excuse: “One Thing Helping Trump’s Approval Rating: Some People Are Not Paying Attention.”
The subhead: “Voters were more likely to approve of President Trump’s job performance if they had not been following some of the major news stories of his first 100 days in office, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found.”
Times poll developer Ruth Igielnik settled on a condescending angle to explain away Trump’s supposedly inflated thought still negative approval ratings: People aren’t paying attention to what Trump is doing (or at least not paying sufficient heed to that Trump-hostile filter known as the mainstream press).
President Trump’s strategy to “flood the zone” may be working to keep his approval rating from sinking even lower.
Voters who have not heard much about some of the many major news events from the first 100 days of Mr. Trump’s second term have a higher opinion of the job he is doing, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A little under half of the 42 percent of voters who approved of the job Mr. Trump is doing as president said they had not heard much about at least some of the ups and downs of his administration’s decisions.
The poll asked voters: “There is a lot happening in the news right now. How much, if anything, have you heard about each of the following things?” The first item on that list was, “A man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.”
That “mistaken” deportation referred of course to the media’s infamous “Maryland man,” Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Later, under the rubric “Tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump has handled each of the following issues as president,” the poll queried, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump has handled immigration?”
Igielnik noted triumphantly:
Voters were more likely to approve of how Mr. Trump is handling immigration if they had not heard much about the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who the administration acknowledges was mistakenly deported.
Yet exactly what voters had heard about the case, pro- or anti-Trump, was left aside. Remember that Garcia, an illegal from El Salvador and suspected MS-13 gang member, was the media’s poster boy opposing Trump’s mass deportation scheme.
The poll didn’t mention the conviction of the killer of Rachel Morin, a mother of five killed by an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. That’s the wrong kind of immigration news to be following, apparently.
Apparently considering this angle a gotcha! against Trump voters, she twisted the knife:
Mr. Trump has traditionally done well with lower-information voters, so it is perhaps not surprising that they are more inclined to support his presidency. These voters are also notoriously difficult for pollsters to reach, making it challenging to track their exact impact.
And the blitz of news can be hard to follow even for the most engaged voters. In his first 100 days, Mr. Trump signed more executive orders than any other modern president, part of a strategy to make changes at such velocity that people could not possibly pay attention to all of them
Late in the piece came the real knee-slapper. Trump voters -- and not anti-Trump voters -- suffer from consuming "media diets" from only one side. Imagine that!
One inevitable complication in understanding how attention paid to stories in the news corresponds with political support is that consumers can design a media diet of information from only one side or perspective. Some outlets pass over entire stories, and the language used by different outlets is sometimes so wildly divergent that people may not even recognize two stories as being about the same topic.
It's a "complication" that the Times can't influence people who refuse to put them in their "media diet."
