Here & Now

Wisconsin Voters Struggle With Trust In 2016 Election

Newscaster:

This is a new batch of emails. That’s all ahead this hour.

Zac Schultz:

Over the course of four decades, Donald Trump built his personal brand believing the old phrase, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But the last few months in the spotlight may have changed his mind.

Donald Trump:

Oh, is the media dishonest? How dishonest are these people?

Zac Schultz:

And his supporters are fully on board.

Jeanne Crone:

The general media, I don’t trust at all.

Lisa Hallenbeck:

I think they’re very biased.

Zac Schultz:

They aren’t out of the mainstream. According to the pollster, Gallup, American trust in mass media has reached an all-time low with just 32% saying that have a fair amount or great deal of trust in the media. Broken down by party, just 14% of Republicans have at least a fair amount of trust in the media. At 51%, Democrats are considerably more confident in the media, but even they have big concerns.

Hannah Kasun:

What I think is rough in the news coverage is that people who get the most press are usually people making outrageous statements or doing some crazy thing.

Bernie Sanders:

A lot of the media portrays politics as a personality contest. As a Dancing with the Stars event.

Charlie Sykes:

You’re listening to News Radio 620 WTMJ, I’m Charlie Sykes.

Zac Schultz:

Charlie Sykes has spent the last couple decades building his own media brand as the most influential conservative talk show host in Wisconsin.

Charlie Sykes:

There was a perception on the part of conservatives that the mainstream media was biased, that it was unfair, that is was selective in what it covered and I think this was true. And as a result of this, you had a market for conservative talk radio.

Announcer:

Introducing the next president of the United States, Mr. Donald J. Trump!

Zac Schultz:

But the rise of Donald Trump has led Sykes to believe conservative talk radio went too far in de-legitimizing mainstream media in the eyes and ears of conservatives.

Charlie Sykes:

Our critiques of the mainstream media had perhaps had unintended consequences that we had been too successful.

Zac Schultz:

Sykes was one of the first and loudest voices in the never Trump movement.

Charlie Sykes:

Because I think what Donald Trump has done has been to create this perfect storm of awfulness.

Zac Schultz:

He tried to counter Trump supporters with facts from the New York Times or Washington Post.

Charlie Sykes:

The instinctive reaction was well those are liberal rags. We don’t need to pay any attention, and that was my Whoa moment. Have we actually created kind of a monster here?

Zac Schultz:

Conservative voters today don’t need the mainstream media to feel informed. Beyond Fox News, they have websites like Breitbart and the Drudge Report that aggregate content from other sources, not all of them reputable or reported with the highest standards of journalism. Trump’s biggest media asset is his Twitter account, with 12 and a half million followers retweeting his message.

Jeanne Crone:

His Twitter account and all the people that are promoting him on Twitter, that helps a lot.

Charlie Sykes:

You wake up and you realize well there are no more gatekeepers. There’s no more fact checking.

Donald Trump:

We have to watch what’s going on because this is a dirty business. This is a very, very dirty business. You know what I mean, watch what’s going on.

Zac Schultz:

Trump doesn’t stop with attacking the media.

Charlie Sykes:

He has de-legitimized all of the institutions of our society.

Zac Schultz:

Trump has attacked the whole system from the government to the military to political parties to the political process itself.

Donald Trump:

It’s all part of the rigged system being run at your expense.

Deborah Bargenquast:

They’re already having dead people vote in Colorado on absentee ballots, I mean, I mean they can’t win without cheating.

Charlie Sykes:

You know here we are in which you do have the wildest conspiracy theories from the far reaches of the alt right fever swamps that are now part of the mainstream political dialogue and that’s dangerous.

Zac Schultz:

It’s made voters across the political spectrum nervous about whether the election will be legitimate.

Elayne Moore:

I’m not as comfortable with it this year, no.

Luis Garcia:

I keep reading stories about you know, missing ballots and this and that.

Lisa Hallenbeck:

There’s a lot of things on the internet you know where people that are in charge of our elections have been shown and proven how easily it can be rigged.

Charlie Sykes:

They’re gonna blame it on being rigged and this will be very important for their narrative, and I think the damage that will do to the country is huge because they do have this echo chamber where they will convince an awful lot of people that somehow this was stolen from them.

Woman:

That’s part of–

Zac Schultz:

Charlie Sykes is ending his radio show at the end of the year, and plans to write a book about what happened to the conservative movement.

Charlie Sykes:

And I think that conservatives honestly, at the end of this process have to look themselves in the eye and say okay, to what extent did we contribute to that? To what extent did we ignore that? And where do we go from here?

Crowd:

USA! USA! USA!