Newspaper chain Gannett has told its newsrooms across the nation to cut down on opinion pieces and biased articles which are “repelling” their readers and driving away subscribers. Gannett, which owns USA Today as well as local papers in virtually every state, is rated “Left-Center” by Media Bias / Fact Check, so you can bet the readers aren’t objecting to the rare conservative viewpoint. No, they’re just sick of being lectured to.
According to DailyMail, a committee of editors from the chain’s newspapers said in an April presentation that “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think. They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues.” DailyMail continued:
Readers this week reacted to the news by telling the media company to hire ‘writers that aren’t left-wing activists.’ Americans’ faith in the media has nose-dived in recent years thanks largely to the widely left-wing bias of many national publications and news networks.
It’s not their audience’s losing faith in the media that has Gannett spooked though. It’s lost revenue from cancelled subscriptions. Washington Post
Not only are editorials and opinion columns “among our least read content,” the committee said, but they are “frequently cited” by readers as a reason for canceling their subscriptions.
USA Today’s newspaper circulation is one of the highest in America. This combined with USATODAY.com reaches over seven million daily readers. It is huge that USA Today decided to stop giving opinions.
As a result of the order, Gannet’s over 250 newspapers are already scaling back their opinion pages and scrapping political endorsements except on the local level. It seems that Gannett is learning the same lesson as CNN—that constant lecturing, bias, and shaming don’t make people interested in your content. As Nick Arama reported, ratings-challenged CNN is undergoing its own retooling.
David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery and who manages CNN, told Oprah Winfrey that CNN should be all about truth and facts. “If we get that, we can have a civilized society,” he said. “And without it, if it all becomes advocacy, we don’t have a civilized society.”
The NY Post weighed in on Gannett’s bias crackdown Friday with an editorial titled, “Corporate media may at last be waking up to reality”:
It began to damage its own credibility after the industry convinced itself that it was supposed to be telling readers what to believe, how and when to do so. According to Gallup, the vast majority of Americans have lost faith in media’s ability to accurately and fairly report news.
The Post has the right answer according to a Gallup poll from 2021
In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” and 29% “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting — which, combined, is four points above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential election campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The pandemic only increased the media’s credibility problem, probably because people locked up in their homes paid more attention and realized that they were constantly being harangued, gaslit, and lied to:
Trust in legacy media plummetted over course of pandemic: survey https://t.co/rBj03jMUU1 via @truenorthcentre
— Candice Malcolm (@CandiceMalcolm) June 10, 2022
While Gannett’s order focuses on getting rid of editorials, letters to the editor, and national political endorsements, I think the message they’re sending is that “straight” articles need to be less biased too. It’s an open secret that most mainstream newspapers operate as propaganda arms of the Democratic National Committee and ignore at least half the country. We may finally be seeing the beginning of change because America’s readers and viewers are waking up—and walking away.
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