Mike’s Minute: A good example of why people don’t trust the media

I have a good example as to why so many people don’t trust the media. 

Like most things it's got complicated and a lot of it is fuelled by emotion. 

So a simple survey, the likes of which was published by AUT over the weekend, can never come close to capturing exactly what the relationship between the industry and the punter really is. 

But the US President had a medical over the weekend. It has been widely reported and in fact, I have read a number of the reports that states he is in pretty good shape. 

The headline in the Sydney Morning Herald chose to frame it this way; "Overweight Trump has sun damage after 'frequent golf wins' medical report finds". 

Now, you have several issues. 

Firstly, the subject: a lot of what is reported about Trump is done with a slant and the slant is made more obvious by the fact that those who support Trump tend to be zealous and therefore will react to perceived misreporting more loudly than many others. 

Secondly, the report does indeed say he is overweight. But it is not the main part of the report, or anywhere close to it, nor indeed is the sun damage. The sun damage is definitely there, but it's hardly a feature. 

In fact, if the headline is supposed to convey the important parts of the medical report, it completely misses them. The important parts are that physically and cognitively he is in very good shape. 

Why doesn’t the headline say that? What is the purpose of the headline, other than to mislead you or ridicule the President by presenting the report in the worst possible light? 

That is trust, or lack of it. 

That is a bad headline, a misleading headline, and a headline that shows us the newspaper has an agenda. 

It's hardly the end of the world. It's not scandalous, it's not a lie, and there is worse to be found other days in other places. 

But the paper is an esteemed rag with big readership and, I assume, a certain pride in their reporting. 

In that lies the complexity. Take a lot of these sort of examples on any given day, from any given number of outlets and before you know it – lack of trust. 

If like I did, you knew more than the headline alluded to, you very quickly concluded you couldn’t trust them for the full story. 

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