The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza bemoans a poll:

And now for today’s least shocking statistic: Just four in 10 Americans say they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the media to report the news fairly and accurately, according to new data from Gallup. That matches historic lows the media also “achieved” in 2012 and 2014.

And while Republicans trust the media less than Democrats do, the numbers across all party affiliations are in rapid decline from even a decade ago.

There’s little evidence that the whole trusting-the-media thing is going to get more popular; people under 50 years old are far more skeptical of the idea of media as fair arbiters than those over 50.

GOOD!, some of you will, undoubtedly shout — particularly if you are either a conservative Republican or liberal Democrat.  You deserve what you get! Your years of lies and agenda-pushing have finally caught up to you. WE ARE ON TO YOU.

To which I say: Wrong.

I don’t say that to be a jerk. I understand that many people who feel passionately about the rightness of one party or the other (and plenty of people who don’t) are simply convinced that the media is pursuing some sort of narrative that somehow furthers our collective “goals.” (If you were in the media, you would know we aren’t even close to organized enough to orchestrate such a grand plan. But I digress.) And I will grant that, like in any industry, there are some bad apples and some high-profile mistakes that people seize on as evidence that their pet theory of the media (too liberal/ too conservative) is correct.

But, I believe really strongly that the decline in trust in the media is primarily attributable to partisans — whether in politics or in the media — who have a vested interest in casting the press as hopelessly biased. What better way for liberal or conservative talk radio to (a) lure listeners and (b) stoke outrage than to insist that the mainstream media is lying to you? What better way for politicians to raise money from partisans already skeptical about the media than to say the media isn’t telling the truth?

The rise of outside partisan groups — on the left and the right — has coincided with a bumper crop of partisan-first media outlets designed to foment rage and exasperation with the mainstream media’s alleged missteps. It’s good business for them — and just plain terrible for the American public.

The belief — pushed by these groups and outlets — that there are no referees (or even rules) in all of this makes disagreeing without being disagreeable is virtually impossible. The idea of reasonable people disagreeing has also been laid to rest or damn near it.  The realities of our modern political dialogue — if you can use that word to describe it — is that people who disagree with your point of view are at best dumb and at worst purposely misunderstanding things. From those conclusions about motive, nothing positive can come.

You can think the media thinks too highly of itself. (We do.) You can ask who appointed us the refs. (Fair.) And, you can be skeptical — in fact, you should be skeptical — of something being reported that smells fishy to you. (We, as humans, can and do get stuff wrong.) But what you should not wish for is that the mainstream media disappear or be rendered irrelevant.

Whether you like or agree with an independent media all the time — breaking news: you won’t! — you should value an entity that does its best to hold those in power accountable. Without such a force, you would like society a whole lot less. And our society would be a whole lot less.

All it took was one comment to blow up Cillizza’s premise:

A brief review of the Washington Post’s headlines this morning on its website reveals the following headlines:

“Ted Cruz can’t win in the Senate”
“Inept GOP attacks on Planned Parenthood”
“Warren wins another battle in war on Wall Street”
“How Elizabeth Warren picked a fight with Brookings — and won”
“Top Republican suffers disastrous outbreak of candor about Hillary Benghazi probes”
“Why Republicans are scared of everything and everyone right now”
“The Republican race to offend”

Cillizza is correct – partisans are the problem. He just hasn’t identified the right ones. The problem is the partisans within the MSM, not those who criticize them.

Although this additional comment was amusing …

“Print media decided to make a headline look like BuzzFeed clickbait. You’ll never believe what happens next.”

… as was, in a more black-humor sort of way …

I’m surprised the trust is as high as it is.

… while this comment breaks open the media closet door …

What a self-important, thin-skinned, delusional puff piece. Not for one second does Cilizza grant that maybe just maybe his critics have a point. He acknowledges the media’s self importance and lack of accountability but not how close journalists are socially to their sources; not the intense drive for profit first; not the demands on their time and fewer newsroom resources that hamstring their reporting; not the bizarre fetish with balance instead of factual truth (especially I’m science policy coverage); not group think; and not the fact that general, national, and political reporters write on topics they know nothing about.

… and this comment grasps something Cillizza apparently can’t:

Dear Mr. Cillizza – to you I say: Wrong. I would agree that partisans on the left and right have taken unjustified swipes at you, but that doesn’t lie at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is the decline of journalism. TV journalism went over to the entertainment side of TV and print journalism has gone ever more yellow to “compete.” Today’s “journalists” look for the quick, easy and showy story. You all tend to follow the latest “squirrel!!” sighting. You’ve lost such a simple thing as memory. One reason Jon Stewart was so popular with folks my age (can you say “Medicare”?) in spite of the often juvenile humor was that he and his researchers actually compared what someone said today with what that person said last week, and last year. With the death of Tim Russert (spelling?), the last of the true journalists was gone. You want respect. EARN IT!

Russert, of NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” formerly worked for Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. O’Neill was not a Republican, and neither was Russert. And yet Russert asked tough questions of all “Meet the Press” guests, even if he agreed with them politically. Not nearly enough journalists who cover politics, at any level, do that today. (Most are too fixated on the race — who’s leading, who’s rising, who’s fading — and not nearly enough on candidates’ positions on the issues beyond campaign-supplied generalities.)

For Cillizza to complain about our culture’s inability for people to disagree without being disagreeable is rich considering the media’s contribution to our cultural debate debasement. One concludes from opinions printed on pages other than opinion pages (this means you, Chris Rickert of the Wisconsin State Journal) as well as online blogs on publication websites that there is little actual reporting going on anymore at daily newspapers. To do the boring stuff like reporting is apparently beyond many journalists anymore, including Cillizza.

When I read Cillizza’s blog there were 99 comments. They were not all from conservatives; they came from the other end of the spectrum as well. Not one comment attempted to defend Cillizza’s point of view. That seems to indicate that readers find Cillizza’s premise that people have been trained by political types to not trust the media absurd.

There are two schools of thought about media political bias. The first, which is clearly wrong, is that the media is biased toward the right because media outlets are businesses. The business side of the media proves Lenin’s observation that capitalists would sell you the rope with which to hang them.

The second, and more correct, school of thought about media political bias is that journalists go into this line of work thinking they can change the world, so they’re liberals. In a sense many journalists are like politicians who go into politics not to make money, but to gain power.

(As long as we’re talking about the faults of my line of work: The bigger problem to me with journalism is that the media is biased toward incumbents. The media deserves a lot of blame for incumbents’ ability to get reelected because the media reports what a politician does or says, too often at face value, without challenging the politician or presenting an opposite point, or points, of view. Unrelated to that is the additional flaw of too many journalists being more interested in advancing their careers than doing their jobs where they are.)

My next comment does not defend Cillizza’s point of view, but … there are media consumers who criticize media reporting that does not conform to their own worldview. That, however, has been the case as long as the media has existed. I suppose there were readers of Poor Richard’s Almanack who despised its publisher, Ben Franklin, for being wrong about the British. That is why every community of any size used to have newspapers that had such labels as “Democrat” or “Republican” in their names, so the readers would know what they were getting, instead of the more reporting-focused “Journal” or “Gazette” or “Times.” (As it is, Wisconsin newspapers include the Darlington Republican Journal, the Mineral Point Democrat–Tribune, and the Muscoda Progressive, though arguments in favor of those party labels appear only in letters to their editors. Apparently when The Capital Times started publishing in Madison the word “Communist” had not been invented yet.) Even if the labels weren’t blatant, in almost every market with multiple newspapers, the locals knew which paper touted which political cause.

To repeat what I’ve written here before: The concept of an impartial media unconnected to a political party or cause is only 100 or so years old in this country. Perhaps that’s the result of the early days of radio and TV news, two mediums that supposedly are owned by the public. Clearly a majority of media consumers doesn’t see the so-called legacy media — daily newspapers, radio and TV — as impartial and unbiased, or even fair.

As for whether that legacy media is holding those in power accountable, that is clearly not the case. (If a journalist’s default position was 100 percent cynicism about an elected official at any level, the journalist would be right more often than not.) As for whether we would like today’s society even less were it not for journalists … what’s to like now?