Study links impeachment beliefs to regular news diets

The Associate Press ^ | January 24, 2020 | By DAVID BAUDER

[Oldeconomybuyer]

For many Americans, how they feel about issues raised during President Donald Trump’s impeachment has much to do with where they get their news.

A study released Friday by the Pew Research Center illustrated these tendencies, along with the growing Republican suspicion of media sources during the Trump administration.

Roughly two-thirds of Republicans who got their news exclusively from outlets with a primarily conservative audience like Fox News, Breitbart or Rush Limbaugh’s radio show told pollsters in November they believed Trump withheld aid from the Ukraine to advance a U.S. policy to reduce corruption there, Pew said.

Some 10% of these Republicans said Trump did it to help his re-election campaign — the heart of the House’s impeachment case against the president.

But the gap between those views narrows among Republicans with a more varied media diet. And Republicans who avoided media with right-leaning audiences were more likely to say Trump was acting for his own political gain (34% to 21%), although 43% said they weren’t sure why he did it, Pew said.

Democrats who said they got news from outlets that appeal to liberals (MSNBC, NPR or The New York Times) or a mixed audience (ABC and CBS News, USA Today) overwhelmingly said Trump was acting in self-interest, Pew said.

The only place where more uncertainty seeped in was among Democrats who avoided outlets that appealed primarily to the left, although 49% of these still believed Trump was helping himself.

Similarly, those who followed a conservative media diet were much more likely to believe the false narrative that former Vice President Joe Biden called for a Ukrainian prosecutor’s removal to protect his son from being investigated.

[daltec]

There were two major newspapers in the USSR: Pravda (which is Russian for "The Truth") and Izvestiya (which is Russian for "The News").

They had a joke, along the lines of "The Truth is not The News, and The News is not The Truth."

I don't know if Russians are smarter or not, but many of them certainly knew what was going on.