DOES THE TODAY SHOW REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT TRUST?

This morning, during a Today Show interview with UN Ambassador/former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Savannah Guthrie asked whether the White House (read that as President Trump) has a credibility problem, since “there’s a new poll out just last night and it shows that the vast majority of Americans do not trust the information they’re getting out of the White House.”

(The poll was conducted by that bastion of honest news, CNN, and can be seen by clicking here.)

A question for NBC:  do you guys really want to travel down this road?

I have a ton of data available to explain that question.  But I think I’ll settle on the Marist/NPR poll conducted in late June.

Here is what NPR’s Judy Woodruff had to say about it, while speaking to political writer Stuart Rothenberg, during her July 3 show:

 I do want to raise, in our last few minutes, this new CNN — I’m sorry. I had CNN on the brain from the video — the new poll that the NewsHour and NPR did in conjunction with Marist, where one of the things we looked at was what Stu — exactly what you mentioned — high distrust of the news media. More than two-thirds of Americans — they were asked, what do you think about trust in institutions? And here it is: thirty-seven percent, a good deal or a great amount of trust in the Trump administration; thirty percent — even less — trust in the news — in the media; and twenty [nine] — about on the same par as trust in Congress. And you go on to see trust in the intelligence community, twice that much — sixty percent — and in the courts, sixty percent.

But the bottom line here, Stu, is that the media may be a good whipping boy.

So what do we see?

We see that the Trump administration, with its paltry 37% level of trust….is MORE trusted than the news provided by media – like, for example, from NBC.  And that media news and congress are at the same 29%-30% level.

As any marketing researcher worth his/her salt – or any non-researcher with a basic level of common sense – would easily conclude, the key finding here is that the public does not trust any of them.  But if you’re establishing a pecking order, the Trump White House is significantly higher up the food chain than either of the other two.

Oh, and don’t you love Woodruff’s “the media may be a good whipping boy” line?  Is the Trump administration “a good whipping boy” too, Ms. Woodruff?  Or does that only work for the folks you’re in cahoots with?

The bottom line is that members of the news industry, whether Guthrie, Woodruff or anyone else, would do well not to toss stones at President Trump’s trustworthiness.  Because it exposes a comparison they definitely do not want the public to make.