Conservative Media Has an Audience Problem

NYT OPINION: Conservative Media Has an Audience Problem
By Ross Douthat
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 12, 2023 at 03:00AM

Why right-wing journalism is a prisoner of TV.

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the divergent intellectual climates in journalism and academia, but mostly left conservative media out of the discussion. Now we have a new YouGov survey on public trust in media that provides an opening to talk about the climate on the right.

The basic and unsurprising finding of the survey is that Democrats generally trust the media much more than Republicans do, and that this trust gap extends to almost every prominent outlet except a few websites and the right-wing cable networks — the big fish of Fox News and the minnows of Newsmax and OAN. Democrats aren’t just more likely to say they trust ABC, NBC, CNN and PBS. They’re more likely than Republicans to say they trust The Wall Street Journal, notwithstanding its conservative editorial page. They’re even more likely than Republicans to say they trust National Review, theoretically the intellectual flagship of the right.

That last finding is a red flag, an indicator that some of the respondents probably don’t recognize a lot of the outlets they’re being asked about and are just guessing based on vague heuristics, memories of legacy brands and so on. (Do the Democrats who say they trust the right-leaning Washington Examiner read the Washington Examiner? I’m skeptical.) As the redoubtable press critic Jack Shafer notes, this is a good reason to discount a lot of the specific findings in the report: Bloomberg doesn’t actually need to worry that it’s less trusted by Americans than the shell of Newsweek, because most Americans don’t read Newsweek anymore, they just recognize the name.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/opinion/conservative-mainstream-media.html