Modern Mainstream Media... How Words Manipulate Ones Reality.

In the modern world of technology, many more people become more and more critical of the media.  The level of critique has gotten so bad with the dawn of the internet that it is almost a joke in some cases.

Just adding four words makes all of the difference.

In the chart above it shows how adding just four measly words to a phrase and suddenly the whole meaning is flipped to some people.  The best example is Republicans view of is the media moral as in the "the news media" the percent of people that agree with the statement is only 14% while when the words "you use most often" are added suddenly the percentage jumps to 57%, a drastic 43% increase just from adding four words.  However, this same trend can be said for Democrats as well.  Even though the jumps are not as drastic when asked if "the news media cared about the people they reported on", Democrats went from 33% to 46% with the same four words that were asked to cause Republicans to have a similar increase.  Based on the statistics alone, there is a direct correlation between the increase of people who trust the media that they use from the ominous "news media"  because logically people are likely to trust others that have similar ideas to them.  This trend is called a confirmation bias, which consists of the idea that only people that think in a similar way are right.

Chart by PewResearch

The chart above shows how this confirmation bias really affects one's perseption of what is correct.  The chart was created based on answers on a survey by Pew Research that placed the media sites based on the average response to the survey.  The chart also shows that the average respondent was slightly left which could cause the distribution to be off from where the media sites actually fall on the political spectrum.  Based on the subjective evidence in the chart as the data is placed based on the ideology of those used in the study, we can see that Fox News, a news outlet considered to be extreme right and full of fake news, is no more right than MSNBC is left.  In fact, news outlets that are considered to be factual like the New York Times and PBS are farther left than Fox is right but because the average respondant answered more left it only is logical that Fox would be considered far right.  Through this, one can infer that as a whole one's trust in the media is solely based on a confirmation bias as many people only want to surround themselves with people and ideas that have the same view as themselves thus causing this frankly concerning trend revolving around the peoples trust in the media.