Outrage 014 – How we can try to make sure news enlightens rather than enrages us – Lawrence Eppard

Just 34% of Americans’ say they trust the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairlyโ€ according to Gallop. In that polling, Democrats generally trust the media more than Republicans. The majority of Republicans indicate that they have no trust in the media at all.

A New York Times-Siena College poll found almost 60 percent of voters view the media as a โ€œmajor threat to democracy.โ€ This was also divided along partisan lines, with 87 percent of Trump voters indicating they view the media as a major threat, while 33 percent of Biden voters thought so.

These numbers can be worse depending on the poll but they all underscore one thing: Americans say they donโ€™t trust news media.

Trust in media, misinformation, disinformation, news literacy, content moderation. How do we stay informed without becoming overwhelmed with outrage overload? These are all challenging problems.

In this episode, I sit down with Shippensburg University Professor Lawrence Eppard to find answers.

Lawrence M. Eppard is Associate Professor of Sociology at Shippensburg University. His areas of research include poverty, economic inequality, and racial inequities. He has recently published the book Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality (with Rank and Bullock), and is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press tentatively titled On Inequality and Freedom.

Transcript

Links

Director of the Connors Forum for a Healthy Democracy

Host of the Utterly Moderate Podcast


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Outrage Overload is a podcast about the outrage industry, my journey to discover what it is, how it affects us, and what we can do about it.