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Americans’ trust in the media has reached all time lows, with just 11 percent expressing confidence in television news and 16 percent expressing confidence in newspapers. These are the startling findings of Gallup’s latest survey of American attitudes about the media, which since 1972 has tracked the ups and downs of public confidence in the news.

An interactive graph at Gallup’s website provides a clear picture of the erosion of public confidence in the so-called Fourth Estate over the past five decades. Peaking in 1979 at 51 percent, the public trust in journalism has been on a steady downward trajectory ever since, with confidence plummeting at key turning points in history. Trust dropped to 35 percent in 1981, the beginning of the Reagan-Bush era and then plunged again to 31 percent in 1987, the year after the Iran-Contra Affair broke.

Since then, public confidence has continued to wane, year after year, with 46 percent of Americans now saying that have “very little” or no trust in newspapers and 53 percent expressing the same distrust of television news. With 37 percent expressing “some” confidence in newspapers and 35 percent having some degree of trust in TV news, the amount of people saying they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust is relatively minuscule.

[consortiumnews.com]

{A seminal moment in this process was the purging of New York Times journalist Raymond Bonner after he reported on the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army’s massacre of men, women and children at a remote village called El Mozote at Christmastime 1981.

The Reagan administration convinced Bonner’s editors that he had been duped by Communist disinformation, while a White House-funded outfit called Accuracy in Media amplified the smears against Bonner and his colleague Alma Guillermoprieto, who were made out to be liars. Under intense pressure and abandoned by his editors, Bonner’s career at The New York Times soon ended.

Although Bonner’s reporting would ultimately be vindicated by a United Nations excavation of the massacre site a decade later, which uncovered hundreds of skeletons — including those of many small children — the failure of The New York Times to back up its reporter who had established the truth in real time enabled the Reagan administration to continue its support for genocidal death squads in Central America.

This failure was partly the result of a systematic effort by the White House, C.I.A. and State Department to contain disclosures and control the media narrative through a strategy called “perception management.”

By applying pressure on editors and TV producers, combined with disseminating misleading information, government officials were able to marginalize honest journalists and present a false picture to the American people about key issues, particularly the dirty wars being fought in their name in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.}

Every war since that Reagan era has been a product of false narratives and deceptive means to engage. Every war! Every American lost in them became a crime. Every citizen lost became a crime. Today in regards to Ukraine we are supporting and funding more crimes. Fooling America

The press is no longer bullied into compliance. It is a collaborator in the crimes.