About a sixth of the country relies most on Trump as the source of information about the coronavirus
By Philip Bump
After I wrote about President Trump's claim that he is using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine in an effort to stave off infection from the coronavirus, a critic responded on Twitter.
“Who the F are you anyway,” the person asked. “Ohhh. A reporter. Never mind. I don’t read your type of [eight-letter bovine term for nonsense]."
One would be ill-advised to extrapolate outward from one interaction, of course. But the sentiment offered was striking: You don’t read anything from any reporter? It’s just a category of information that you reject out of hand, just like that? I’m certainly familiar with people who are skeptical of the media and certainly aware that confidence in the media is low. Before this week, though, I’d never encountered someone who just uniformly rejected members of the profession out of hand.
That interaction came to mind when I was presented with new data from Pew Research Center documenting how people’s preferred sources of information about the coronavirus pandemic overlap with their views of what’s happening. Of those Pew polled, about a quarter said the source of information about the pandemic they relied on the most was the national news media, such as The Washington Post. Another 18 percent said it was public health professionals. Sixteen percent identified Trump and the White House coronavirus task force as the source of information they rely on the most.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/20/about-sixth-country-relies-most-trump-their-source-information-about-coronavirus/
Guess you can't fix stupid.