IS FOX THE #1 MOST TRUSTED NEWS SOURCE IN AMERICA? WELL...

Hopefully you've already seen this year's chilling Orwellian political fantasy film, V FOR VICTORY. It takes place in Britain in the not too distant future at a time when the BBC, apparently the only source of news, has become an integral part of the totalitarian government's propaganda efforts. Today, reading a media headline about Republican Party propaganda arm, Fox "News," being the #1 most trusted news source in the U.S., sent a chill down my spine, as well as a feeling of utter despair.

Fortunately, the news isn't as bad as it would seem from the scare-tactic headline. Trust in news sources is so diverse that "the #1 most trusted" is trusted by 11% of the American people. Whew! 11% is an even smaller percentage of people who approve of either Dick Cheney or Paris Hilton. It nicely encompasses most of the folks who are either sitting around waiting for the End of Times or who want to start up the Confederacy again (although there is an awful lot of cross-over in these two groups).

More and more people-- particularly young people-- cite "the Internet" as their most trusted news source, naming Google, Yahoo and MSN. Nearly 1 in 5 people between the ages of 18 to 24 named the Internet as their most important source of news (true for 9% of the general population, not all that much different from people who cited Fox "News.")

Worldwide 61% say they trust media, compared to 52% who trust their governments. The study doesn't go into perceptions of when governments and mass media are one in the same (as in the case of Fox News and the Bush Regime/Republican Party).

Before starting DWT I had always worked in the media-- as a journalist, a radio dj, a press agent/publicist, the founder of an independent record company and, eventually, as the president of a large record label owned by TimeWarner (and, disastrously, AOL). Watching media closely and thinking about it more than is healthy has been part of my life since the '60s. But if there's one thing I learned it's that there is nothing that compares-- when it comes to trust-- to word of mouth. Virtually all media marketing campaigns are geared towards generating word of mouth.

People don't buy (or buy into) something because of a direct ad but because of the buzz or the word-of-mouth that is engendered in the wake of advertising or publicity and public relations campaigns. Record companies spend millions of dollars making videos, trying to get them exposed and using every method conceivable-- just ask Eliot Spitzer-- method to get radio stations to play their songs. But do people rush out to buy a CD because they hear a song on the radio. Some do, especially if they hear it a billion times. But when all that media exposure can really achieve that is worthwhile is the creation of a buzz so that on a peer to peer basis friends and family-- people you might trust even more than Bill O'Liely or Dick Clark, say-- are talking about, or even recommending or endorsing, the song. That's when you hit pay-dirt.

The diffusion of media is a good thing. But it doesn't ameliorate some scary trends towards uniformity. Gigantic media costs and a benign government attitude-- from corporate-oriented whores among both Democrats and, far worse, Republicans have eased the way for more and more monopolistic tendencies in mass media. How many sources are there really? What kind of diversity of experience and attitude is there between CNN, ABC, CBS and Fox? Not very much.

At the end of V FOR VICTORY the propaganda efforts of the fascist government are defeated by... word of mouth. We can afford 11% thinking O'Liely and Hannity are "newsmen" and that what spews out of their faces has something to do with Truth or objective reality-- especially if the other 89% know that even graffiti... or a blog is more worthy of trust.