Mass Media and Loss of Trust
The media is a subject about which MVI has already written at length.
Is it fair, objective, impartial as it would like to claim or has it become politicised, does it serve particular interests only? This question is particularly crucial in the case of public service broadcasting such as RTE, financed by the state. There is now ample evidence that the media is itself engaged in framing and shaping the story.
Consider 2020, a year of turmoil in the US sparked off by the death of George Floyd.
On 12/6/2020 the New York Times ran a Sunday editorial headlined “Yes: We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” which featured probably the most consistent and sustained attack on the police in the modern era.
DAVIA has published an account of what it calls a systematic 10-year long Suppression of the Truth on domestic violence by the Washington Post. It has compiled a list of articles in the Post which it says distorts or falsifies the truth.
In a compelling analysis of today’s media, Jacob Falkovich writes: “To a first approximation, the Narrative running our society is written by the prestige legacy media, which receives The Narrative from experts in academia and government, and spreads it with the help of Hollywood and the education system.
And the media writes whatever maintains The Narrative’s elites in positions of power and authority. Not a day passes without the papers demanding regulation of tech or finance or home-schooling (but never academia or journalism).
The Narrative is against “disinformation”—that is, any counter-narrative, conspiracy, propaganda, fake news. The Narrative is used to rule by fiat, with no challenge”.
Nobody can fail to have noticed the increasing usage of terms such as “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “fake news” in today’s discourse with one side accusing the other of these flagrant abuses in the battle for the public mind.
The Survey
Fortunately we can short circuit most of the noise by asking a simple question: Does the public have trust in the media? Polls have been carried out at least in the US. According to Gallop polling, seven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” of trust in the media, while 38 percent say they have none at all.
The graph below shows the decline in trust over a fifty year period and gives a grim picture of the failing state of journalism over that period.
Further evidence for the loss of trust comes from The Munk debate in Toronto, November 2022. This annual debate has featured many well known figures in current affairs in recent years. The motion was a direct test of the trust of the public.
Motion: Be it Resolved: Don’t Trust the Mainstream Media
In favour: Matt Taibbi, Douglas Murray, both well-known commentators;
Against: Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times and Malcolm Gladwell, Author and journalist.
Before the debate began a baseline vote of the audience gave: Pro 48% Contra 52%. The final vote was utterly decisive: Pro 82%, Contra 18%.
False Allegations
Since the mainstream media, MSM, will not cover controversial issues of concern to men such as domestic violence in a fair manner, other entities/groups have stepped up to fill the void. In this regard another agent of change has been the emergence of DAVIA in the past year as a force on the global scene. False allegations is a particular concern of men’s groups worldwide, which of course the MSM has no interest in covering.
DAVIA has just carried out a survey in eight countries and the results are here.
A false allegation is an accusation that is made in bad faith with the intention of harming the accused person. False allegations are a severe form of domestic abuse that can harm a person’s mental health, social standing, and career, and lead to a wrongful conviction.
It is clear that males are more often the subject of false allegations than females, sometimes by a wide margin. Women are most often the accusers.
A further finding is that false allegations are more prevalent among those involved in child custody disputes. This is a very serious finding which is consistent with reports from other sources.
Adversarial child custody battles are fertile ground for the lodging of false allegations of abuse. All too often, 1 parent will make a false allegation of abuse against the other parent as a way of gaining leverage in a court proceeding. In fact, it is an intentional and purposeful attempt by the accusing parent to throw the other parent under the bus and thereby gain all power in their custody dispute. As such, false allegations of abuse are a weapon of destruction in a family (Alan D. Blotcky, PhD, Psychiatric Times).
Press release: Survey: False Allegations of Abuse Are a Global Problem, Women Most Often the Accusers
News from Australia
A proposed new coercive control law has become the target of Mothers of Sons campaigner Bettina Arndt in New South Wales: A deep dive into the history of coercive control and how it found its place in our criminal law system has left the MOS team astonished at such monstrous chicanery.
They put together a video to mock the new law. The spoof video features a smiling housewife showing off her bottle of “new coercive control.” As Arndt says on the MOS website:
The time is right, with the sisterhood suddenly aware that they have planted seeds of their own destruction. As I explained last week, the roll out of legislation is on hold in NSW, after women’s groups took fright over the possibility their new prized coercive control laws could turn around to bite them. Suddenly there’s a trickle of media stories warning of the dangers of “misidentification”, where women are charged with coercive control instead of men.
We need to ensure that trickle turns into a flood.
In the US we know that an NISVS survey from 2010 found that women commit far more coercive control than men. This is a clear case of the biter bit.