The weekend brought a startling omission from the venerable, politely left-wing magazine The New Yorker, courtesy of staff writer Jay Caspian Kang: “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” (New Yorker style apparently treats the plural word “media” as singular.) Kang’s answer: Pretty biased toward Democrats, if not the far-left.
His question was hooked to Gallup’s annual poll, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media,” a trust which has declined from over 70 percent in 1976 to 31 percent today.
You don’t need a Gallup poll to tell that the public’s trust in the mass media — which for these purposes we can define as the major broadcast and cable networks, newspapers, and a handful of high-profile magazines — has fallen, and, although the reasons for this decline aren’t as immediately clear as they might seem, the fallout from decades of growing…
