Most trusted, least trusted media

It was a poll someone should have done right.

But no one has – yet.

Certainly not the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute of the Missouri School of Journalism.

This one got plenty of attention from media, though – a poll on the most trusted and least trusted press outlets.

The only problem, of course, was it was completely stacked to the political left.

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Not surprisingly, given their affinity for big government, the ultra-liberals who dominated the respondents on this poll put most of their trust in "news agencies" supported by big government – public television, the BBC, NPR and PBS, four of the six highest rated for credibility.

How could that be?

Nearly twice as many self-described liberals as conservatives took the poll.

What? How could that be? Wouldn't that be like conducting a presidential election poll by sampling twice as many Democrats as Republicans? Yes, something like that.

WND.com got no votes, according to this poll, neither credible nor non-credible, despite having far more traffic than 60 percent of the news agencies mentioned. It has also been around for 20 years, longer than any other Internet-only media.

But it's not sour grapes on my part – far from it. The way this poll turned out, I'm grateful the news agency I founded two decades ago – the first independent Internet news outlet – didn't get mentioned. It wouldn't have been pretty given the respondent base.

I guess that's what one should expect when a graduate school of journalism does the research, with a professor in charge.

Wouldn't it make sense that the real standard of "most trusted" news sources would have something to do with traffic? Do people general go to news sources they don't trust? And how do they know what they don't trust if they don't go there?

How many Americans do you think fulfill their daily news consumption by visiting the BBC? Do you think that's real? Or, do you suppose, perhaps, they don't really follow the news on a daily basis? Or, maybe they don't even know where they're getting their news.

Remember, these are mostly Democrats – folks who have drunk deep, maybe even mainlined, from Hillary and Obama's electric Kool-Aid.

You might think the very first thing real pollsters interested in real results would consider was a politically representative database. Last I checked, Republicans were in charge of the presidency, both houses of Congress and most of the state's governorships.

And who is it that is complaining about "fake news"? Conservatives and Republicans – including the president.

Journalism schools, by the way, are the factories that churn out political activists masquerading as truth-telling reporters and editors. Is this where someone would turn for an objective view of the media landscape's credibility?

Not me.

But who am I? I'm just a guy who toiled in the so-called "mainstream media" for more than 20 years before founding the first independent online news service. What do I know? I'm just a guy who ran daily newspapers in major markets before becoming the first guy in media to recognize the digital media represented the future.

It reminds me that in the early pioneer days of Internet news, a European site set out to find out which were the most popular websites in the world. This back in the late 1990s. WND topped the list for more than 100 straight weeks. That didn't make WND the biggest website in the world, but it showed there was passion behind its unique approach – skepticism toward government and other powerful institutions, a commitment to serving as a watchdog on the powerful, seeking truth no matter the cost.

I'm sure some young Ph.D at Missouri University has a much better perspective on such matters – someone who has probably never worked as a reporter or editor in his life.

So what does this unscientific survey amount to? Fake news. Just what we needed for a fresh perspective, huh?

Check out Joseph Farah's newest book, "The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians and the End of the Age."

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