Pollster Dan Cox said Monday that Republican voters are heavily influenced by major GOP figures, such as President Trump, who want them to have a negative view of mainstream media outlets.
“I think they’re fed a steady diet of this anti-media rhetoric — whether it’s from Trump, whether it’s from GOP leadership, whether it’s from Fox News and other conservative networks — where there’s a ‘You cannot trust liberal media, mainstream media, because they’re not telling you the truth,’ ” Cox, research director at the Public Religion Research Institute, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
Trump has targeted mainstream news outlets, such as CNN and The New York Times, often referring to their coverage of him as unfair and “fake news.” That rhetoric has been echoed by other GOP leaders and Republican lawmakers who say the press is biased in favor of Democrats.
An Axios/Survey Monkey poll conducted in June found that 92 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said traditional news outlets knowingly report false or misleading stories in some instances.
Seventy-nine percent of independents said the media sometimes pushed false or misleading stories, while 53 percent of Democrats said the same.
— Julia Manchester
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