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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!
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Trust them about what ? And who the hell is Zogby ?
When the entire public hates the media with such passion as it seems to do now, shouldn't that be a sign to the powers that be that the system needs to be reworked? I know some people are deathly afraid of The Fairness Doctrine, but do you honestly believe our country could be more divided, mislead, and corporate-controlled than it is now? I certainly don't.
Now I can write off Zogby International as a half assed, two bit of a chump market research company. So who paid for this research, Google, Apple or Microsoft?
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News media has always been heavily biased one way or another. There's nothing wrong with this. The problem comes with the source of the bias. It used to be small news outlets trying to stick it to the community's most apparent "bad guys" like big business or the government. They were small and independent. However now, the largest and most influential companies in the world are the owners of the mainstream news media. Disney or Murdoch or it doesn't matter, most people know by now that the companies funding mainstream media are doing it for profit only, and have only that interest in mind. If you see something seemingly controversial on the news it's only because that organization feels everyone agrees (or at least, everyone they think watches their show.)
However, I find it worrying that people trust google. They are just as rabidly chomping at the bit of profit as Disney or NBC, or whatever. They don't have an altruistic plank in their yachts. They pretend to "not be evil" but regularly exert their dominance in public exposure via the web to piss all over other markets in an effort to clear a path for their own business strategy. They make things "free" so nobody can compete in conventional terms, forcing them into advertising revenue or similar structures and guess who has a huge monopoly on advertising online? Yeah... so before you go suckling the teet of google or similar companies, remember what it is they are after in the end.
That said, it's still more understandable to view a source like google as more trustworthy, but the problem is that google does not report on the news, they only repeat it from the other, less trusted sources, so it's sort of pointless to compare them.
When it comes to trusting information, it is acceptable to think the official source will be more truthful, even if occasionally they are not. News media gets a pass for some reason, maybe citing bad information, but authoritative organizations get panned for any lies, even accidental unimportant ones. So when an organization like MS or Apple or Google lies about something, it's either well known right away or it's well hidden, and the latter is much more common in my experience.
Not trusting social networking sites ... well that's just a surprisingly, unusually rational position to hold by the general public. Personally I "trust" twitter itself more than facebook, but trust the information less. I trust facebook to constantly try to screw me the way I described google doing it, subversively, for their own profit, under the guise of helping. Just see the constant quiet changes made to their privacy policies as cases where they didn't get away with it. Twitter is easier to trust just because they don't promise anything. You can protect your tweets, but that's about it. You can block followers but you know your tweets and most info is public. Twitter hasn't changed these policies, there is barely anything to change anyway. When I use twitter, I feel it's very obvious what my privacy expectations are. However, the information coming via twitter is less trustworthy than overhearing gabby women at the local mall. It's the same thing, really, except with infinitely more anonymity to hide your lies and innuendo behind.
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"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"?
There are different studies: In Finland, young people trust newspapers far more than anything in the internet. 78 % say they trust newspapers, while 18 % say they trust internet.
This is a study ordered by Finnish Newspapers Association and made by major independent research company.
Bad google translation here.
Given the aforementioned, the specific numbers hardly paint the picture the summary provides.
I recommend you go over and look at the original report yourselves, it makes some really odd choices – for instance lumping together “trust a little” and “not at all.” Similarly "The Media" represents some monolithic entity - which is also primed against given the pervasive creation and politicization of the catagory of "mainstream media" - whilst Twitter, Google, and Apple somehow deserve their own catagories.
Blasphemy you say! I've actually been actively weaning myself from Google recently. My stance is that you have all your data hostage unless you maintain active backups with a remote host (Google).
What have you done? What do you recommend? How do you become more self sufficient? Google are getting to big to be benevolent: they own Recaptcha, so even if you block Analytics, they have additional analytics from that.
They know who you are, where you live, what you think, who you're communicating with, where you're trying to go, what websites you're a member of, what you're trying to find out, what you're buying, what news you've been exposed to.
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Why don't people trust twitter?
It's pretty transparent and as honest as the people who post on it..
it's under construction
Nonsense, Zogby is the Rob Enderle of polling.
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Bias isn't a reason not to trust a media source -- assuming you know they are biased. I completely trust Murduch's outlets, because I know they are biased and can read through it. That doesn't mean I agree with them, just that I know I can rely on the info to be biased in a certain way, and thus have an indication of truth, at the very least.
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.
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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The article makes no sense. "Trust" in what way? It hints that they're talking about "trust" in the context of your private information, and not as a news source, but doesn't go out and say it. Also, Google is not a source of original information. It compiles news and repackages it from ... well, from traditional news sources.
Why don't people trust twitter/social media? Because even the most Idols addled mind can figure out that a news source with absolutely no accountability or even traceability is totally and utterly worthless.
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Judge this. You can't. It is is a claim but you don't know who claims it, if the person who started the account is still in control of it and have no way to verify or even know what room the person is talking about or if they can accurately determine a fly from another insect.
Mind you, most often when people claim they "trust" a media, they are actually saying "these people say what I want to hear". Someone who doesn't want to give up his SUV is more likely to trust Fox news when it reports global warming is a hoax. People react violently when exposed to a source of information that contradicts what they want to believe. And no, this is NOT just a right-winger thing.
With ever more sources of information it has also become very easy to completely isolate yourself from anything that distresses you. Back when everyone read their OWN newspaper, people at least READ the newspaper. Now kids get their info from twitter and facebook and nothing else. Their source of news, they idea of investigative journalism is "he heard that someone said".
Well RabbitWho shows this, he thinks that because the entity twittering pretends to be a "normal" human being that he/she/it is trustworthy. Because of course nobody could setup bogus accounts to start spreading propoganda over twitter or facebook. No, google bombing does NOT exist in social media. No guerilla marketting of political ideas. Some teen says something so it must be true because... why? How do you know WHO that person really is and wether they should tell the truth let alone the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Because the easiest way to be biased in reporting is to leave out tiny details.
Like how Turkey so upset about Israel killing Turks crossing into Israeli waters went into Iraq to kill Koerdish civlians at the same time. My my, how convenient their righteous indignation kept their own actions from the media. Convenient.
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I trust slashdot posters even less than I trust market research companies.
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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 take on this is that the majority of people, when asked "Do you trust the media?" will answer that "No, I do not." However, in reality they don't think twice about the validity of what they read or hear on TV. It's one of those viewpoints people like to claim to have to sound educated, critical and thoughtful. Quite similiar to all the people who say "I don't judge people by the colour of their skin", "I make sure to check my damn sources on the internet" or "Homosexuality is fine" and STILL firmly grip their wallet when walking through areas were most of the minorities live, still buy any crap any aluminium-hat sells them and still wince at the sight of two men making out (but strangely rarely at LEZBOES.)
Yeah, the study sounds almost as flawed as the summary of it. Trusting Google more than traditional media is almost completely a non-sequitur. Google isn't of itself a source of news. There's Google News that aggregates articles from news sites, but Google doesn't have its own news bureau. The comparison between Google and "traditional media" implies that people were ranking Google as a news provider against traditional news sources, where in actuality that wasn't the comparison at all.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Not quite but they genuinely do balance based on complaints.
In an interview I remember one BBC producer saying they try to end up with piles of complaint letters of similar size for each side of contentious issues.
So old nutters who send a lot of complaint letters do get overrepresented but the BBC isn't all that bad overall.
It's quite common to get lots of letters from both side complaining that a particular show was biased towards the other side.
I tend to disagree. A consistently biased news source is one that deliberately attempts to mislead its users. The trouble is that you don't necessarily know what the bias is on any particular subnject, or when that bias changes. All you know is that the data is unlikely to be reliable as presented.
As such, the rational thing to do is distrust the baised source.
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I'm not sure what your point wrt Enderle is. There are several predictions in that article, all of which are correct, but with some caveats.
Apparently, Enderle said that Apple would switch to Intel chips by the end of 2003. He also said it would use Windows. He was wrong about the year (it was 2006), but Apple computers now run Windows as an option, and they are Intel chips.
Enderle predicted Apple would make smaller, cheaper ipods based on flash memory. Right on all counts.
He predicted that Apple would make an ipod that played video. Right again.
Obviously, he was wrong about the timelines on most (all?) of these, but overall, I'd say that's a pretty impressive record. I certainly wouldn't have called the ipod moving to flash in 2003; at least, not for a long while. I also wouldn't have called Apple moving to x86. He was two years early on the first one and three on the second.
Anyway, I don't think you were trying to imply that this poll is something that's insulted by short-sighted blogs, but is just a little ahead of its time. Maybe you meant it's the Fox News of polling?
This is, to a degree, what they aim for, and does not contradict the grandparent. They regard a report as unbiased when both sides of the issue complain in equal numbers that it is biased towards the other side.
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Mainstream media is distrusted with good reason. It isn't just the bias that everyone knows is there.
Its that they've been caught, not once but several times, reporting stories they knew or should have known were false, as fact, because the stories in question supported that bias.
Spin real news according to your bias, and I'll listen and filter accordingly. Lie to me outright, and I'll never trust you again.
What part of the Fox News motto "Fair and Balanced" do you believe is not a claim to be unbiased?
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Its that they've been caught, not once but several times, reporting stories they knew or should have known were false, as fact, because the stories in question supported that bias.
It is more than that, in addition to reporting stories that they should have known were false (for example, the story about John McCain having an affair during the last election cycle), they have ignored other stories that had more evidence behind them (for example the story about John Edwards having an affair in about the same time frame) that turned out to be true, but didn't support their bias. I use these two stories because I don't have to do any research to be sure that my recollection of the details supports my point, rather than because they are the best examples of how this process works.
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That is true, if the facts are being reported from a different perspective, perhaps with a slightly different emphasis. The problem with Fox News (I can't speak for RM's other companies), is that they have too many activists who don't care what the facts are. I used to watch Fox News, because I wanted to have my opinion challenged, but there were just a few too many times when I would have to go to my computer to fact-check the talking point that had gone unchallenged the past week, or to simply hear the other side of the debate, that I eventually realized that it wasn't worth my time.
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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...if those who distrust traditional media the most trust Fox News the most. Sort of like how every Fox News broadcast belittles the mainstream media when they themselves are the #1 mainstream media outlets in America.
Flame away.
The distrust of the media comes from a an inherent distrust of capitalism. The news media exist to sell advertisements and make money, so they report crap that will do just that.
This is why PBS and NPR are head-and-shoulders above any cable or network news agency.
Mistrusted with good reason indeed. Such as, say, specifically the **entire run up to war in Iraq**.
That pretty much killed all sympathy for the traditional media for me. If I hadn't been fortunate enough to be cynical AND not trust traditional media, I would have been manipulated by fear and anger by what felt like most of the rest of America - which was itself a media-created exaggeration. There were so many dissenting voices, simply ignored.
I mean, tens of thousands march on a street to protest the way in Iraq, and it's a blip on the news. A few hundred honkies gather in a public park to sit in lawnchairs with misspelled signs and hate on taxes, and it's a revolution in the making? That should tell you all you need to know about the integrity of traditional media - and why people aren't trusting it.
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Conceeding the point for a moment, bias is not an absolute quantity. It's like security in that regard. Any security system can be cracked, but that doesn't mean they're all equally insecure. Leave your valuables unguarded in the street is not a rational strategy for securing them.
Similarly some news sources are much less reliable than others. When we say "biased" we generally mean a source that deliberate seeks to mislead, rather than one that occasionally and unconsciously shades its language.
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What part of the Fox News motto "Fair and Balanced" do you believe is not a claim to be unbiased?
What you fail to realize is that when fox news started using it's fair and balanced slogan was when cBS NBC ABC all claimed to be unbiased but clearly were, I have always thought of it as a jab at the other media outlets' bias.
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Funny that, cause I've tried to watch Rachel Maddow and Keith Oberman for the same reasons. I didn't bother to fact check, because their arguments always seem to be self-contradictory. Of course, they'd always bring in an "expert" that completely agreed with their premises, and then call themselves informed. You always see someone with opposing viewpoints in the Fox panels, but I swear they hunt far and wide for the stupidest people they can find.
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