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Study Finds Google Is More Trusted Than Traditional Media
According to a study by market research company Zogby International, people trust Google, Apple, and Microsoft more than the traditional media. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter scored lowest on the trust scale, but still soundly beat the media. From the article: "The traditional media received little sympathy from the public, with only eight percent of all adults and six percent of young adults saying they trusted them."
People don't trust the propaganda arms of massive multinational corporations?! I'm shocked!
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Trust them about what ? And who the hell is Zogby ?
"The Media" is such a loaded phrase these days, that it's no surprise nobody "trusts" them. Years of politicians and everyone else slamming "traditional media", "Big media", "The Liberal Media", and "The Right-wing Media" mean that everyone associates "The Media" with whatever group they disagree with.
Liberals hate "The Media" because, to them, it means "Faux News" and all the other anti-facts news organizations they've been trained to hate.
Conservatives hate "The Media" because, to them, it means "The Liberal Media", which seems to mean anything OTHER than Fox News.
Is anyone surprised that everyone hates a loaded word? Why not just ask if people trust "Terrorists"?
Also, from what I can see they never actually specify what we're supposed to be trusting them with? Our lives? Our children? Our cars? Are we trusting Microsoft, Apple and Google not to tell the world about that time that we accidentally wet the bed when we were really drunk and the three of them put our hand in warm water?
Call me crazy, but a poll with such generic ideas of trust seems almost as useless as a poll about which type of tree people trust the most. Damn, those Nordic Pines look a bit shifty...
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It's much, much harder with media that claims to be unbiased, but of course, is -- because all of them are. The BBC being the perfect example. They claim to be unbiased, but are very much not. It is, however, often hard to tell what their underlying spin is. Thus, I would never ever trust one single thing they say.
Actually, it's not hard to read through the BBC's bias once you realise where it comes from. Because of the way it is set up and regulated, it is in a near permanent state of fear of being accused of bias, which means that it tends to give disproportionate prominence to the views of those most likely to complain. That means that somebody who says the Earth is flat gets equal time to somebody who says that it's round (exaggerating here, but that's the mechanism at work). Once you realise that, it's usually not hard to tell which views are those of people who know what's going on and which views are the screwballs'. What you can be pretty sure of with the BBC is that they don't make their news stories up, because the regulators come down on them like a ton of bricks if they do. Unlike the press, which invents news with impunity.
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But the article compares trust in commercial companies with trust in "the media". Since they do totally different things the comparison is meaningless. I take your point that trust in a very generic way means our belief that they'll do their "given task", but the task of Apple, Microsoft etc. is to make money. And yes, I trust that they'll do that.
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My point, which you've handily illustrated, is that even though Enderle and Zogby usually spout complete bullshit, there are still many apologists suffering from chronic cognitive dissonance who queue up to use them as reliable sources because their random guesses are right half of the time.
Note carefully that Enderle wasn't "predicting" Apples' future strategy, he was talking about what they were just about to announce, and was wrong on every count. By that measure of success, I could predict that Ford's are about to announce a flying car, and in 50 years or so, I'll look like a frikkin' genius.
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