The Highwire with Del Bigtree - TRUST IN MEDIA HITS NEW LOW

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

With less than one week till the Presidential election, public trust in corporate media is at a historic low and viewers have pivoted to independent media for information. Hear how the mainstream media giants are trying to deplatform independent media and have even targeted “The HighWire.”Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We have less than one week till the 2024 presidential election here in the United States. So there's a really big deal. If you're not in America right now, I can tell you the air is electric. I don't think anybody really knows where we're going to go in less than a week, but it is a crazy time here. There's excitement, there's trepidation, but there's hope. So one of the things I really want to talk about, though, with this presidential election that's coming is there's a framing around it that no other presidential election has ever.

had in our lifetimes. And what am I mean by that? That is the corporate media's downfall of their narrative control. They no longer have it. It's over. And so people are thinking for themselves. And we can actually track this through the headlines. In 2021, the middle of the pandemic, we see this headline here. Media trust hits new low. I know a lot of people celebrated for that, except people working in that industry. And you can see here, how low did it go? This chart, 46% percentage of Americans who trusted traditional media. That's less than a coin toss. You're less than 50% of the people. So you're losing the public at that point. And actually that started, you know, I've been a journalist, independent journalist since 2014 in this media space and with the high wire

since 2017 doing weekly reports every week since 2017 nearly. And I can tell you in that space that around 2015, 2016, journalism went from reporting the truth, really respecting free speech to a threat to democracy, a vehicle for spewing hate and conspiracy theories, and there was an attack on it. And the corporate media, rather than defend their own profession, actually jumped in on the attack. So I really do think that was part of it. But now let's go through the headline. So after the pandemic's coming to an end and people are going back to normal and the corporate media is probably saying, boy, I hope our audience comes back. Maybe we can have some integrity. Nope.

2023 America's trust in media plummets to historic low. How low are we talking? Well, 32%. That's the share who said they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in mass media. Well, things I'm here to report are getting worse for mass corporate media. And this is the headline just this month here in October. Media Trust hits another historic low. And it says here, this is a Gallup survey.

By the numbers, as of this year, only 31% of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media, down from 32% last year, which tied the record low set in 2016. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who say they have not very much trust in the media has risen from 27% in 2020 to 33% in 2024. And for historical perspective, prior to 2004, more than half of the American population consistently said they trusted the media. So people are trusting them less, and they're actually not liking them more. It's really bad for that industry. And as you've seen, I want to go through really just how historic this moment is in that context. Because as the corporate media has lost trust, no one in that industry publicly or, I don't know, maybe behind closed doors, really did any sense. self-reflection and said, why don't people trust us anymore? Maybe we should change our programming,

switch things up a little bit. It seems like we're losing viewership. They didn't do that. In fact, they did something that was a monumental mistake. They actually attacked kind of one-to-one. They attacked the people who their audiences were going to. And did they attack them with fact-based smears? No. They basically just call them conspiracy theorists and far-right propagandists and people that are, you know, spewing hate online. Well, that didn't work because the people, the entire, what they're missing, what corporate media was missing was the entire paradigm shift that they were a part of. They're on the back end of it, obviously. But you have people now from all walks of life that are researchers, that are becoming writers in journalists and citizen

journalists, and they're going out and they're creatively making their own media. And in doing that, the audience is actually having a bigger container to hold complex ideas. They're not being spoken to. They're actually a part of this process. They're doing their own research. And they're not falling for these sound bites anymore. They're sitting through long format conversations and loving it. And in doing that, the world change.

Now, you know, what's interesting about the attacks by corporate media is they kind of backed off a little bit and stopped calling their competitors' names. And you saw these organizations pop up, like the Center for Congress. countering digital hate. And they're these shadowy organizations that popped up. And they started attacking those same media outlets like Joe Rogan and Russell Brand and Alex Jones and even us, strangely enough. And they started attacking us and trying to really shut the programming down. And famously, they had the dirty dozen. These were the vaccine misinformation spreaders. And they put out this gigantic report. And it was strangely picked up by corporate media outlets like Forbes and the Guardian and Independent. This is Forbes in 2021. Deplatform, the disinformation, doesn't. And everyone

picked up this report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, but unfortunately, in August of 2024, they all had to issue a retraction because the report had some inaccuracies to it. Here's the retraction. Update, August 2024. In August 2021, Facebook meta issued a press release that argued that the disinformation doesn't account for a much smaller fraction of vaccine misinformation that was claimed by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. So what does that mean? Well, this Center for Countering Digital Hate said, it's just these 12 people. If we can just stop them, if we can just shut their voice down, we'll stop all vaccine disinformation. Well, it turns out that there was a lot bigger portion of the world that was questioning vaccine

safety than just those 12 people, as we all knew. But as it turns out, some journalists got a of some internal documents from CCDH and just publish those and it's looking from bad to worse for CCDH. So remember that organization, Morgan McSweeney, Imran, Ahmed, these are British political operatives running an organization trying to shut down American media outlets, which is kind of strange. But let's look at these internal documents they received. So these are their meeting minutes, their monthly meeting minutes. And you can see here at the top of their annual priorities, Kill Musk's Twitter.

So it says also down there, U.S. policy engagement, set up meeting with Klobuchar's team. Why would CCDH be setting up meetings with a senator in America's team? I thought they were trying to counter hate. Kill Musk's Twitter seems pretty hateful to me. But hey, maybe someone writing that agenda just had an off day and maybe they were just mad at Elon Musk. let's look back at some of the other agenda meeting notes that they had from this year. January 8th, kill must Twitter. They really seem to not like them.

Here's March 5th, 2024. Oops, kill must Twitter. Must kill must Twitter. And then here from this month, kill must Twitter. And that's what we're looking for. So there's your center for countering digital hate, a very loving, flowery organization that's trying to kill must Twitter. Well, it seems not to be working. and that's where we're at right now.