Evidence that the right seeks to discredit mainstream media?
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/to...efforts-degrade-mainstream-medias-credibility
When the Brian Williams scandal broke, conservatives touted it…as a breakthrough moment in their war on media bias...
The leap from one newsman's fictionalized war story to systematic liberal bias in mainstream media is a long one; Williams's apparent flaw was self-aggrandizement, not ideology. But the conservative response is more than just a reflexive use of the right’s most enduring media critique. Conservative activists learned long ago that in order to tear down the MSM, they would have to do more than make a case for bias. They would have to go after journalists’ accuracy as well…
For conservatives, the [Dan Rather/George W. Bush/Air National Guard story] was the exemplar of the connection between accuracy and bias…Why did journalists make these mistakes and editors fail to correct them? Because a liberal worldview kept them from questioning assumptions and double-checking information.
The Brian Williams case, with its lack of any overt political angle, represents the next stage in the evolution of the accuracy argument. Conservatives who pillory the mainstream media because of Williams have no need for the bias argument. The point is to continue to degrade mainstream media’s credibility (which has plunged dramatically since the 1990s), making room for their own explicitly ideological models. As [Sarah] Palin put it, the Williams scandal helps “justify our complete turning away from his ilk in the news media” and toward, presumably, sources like Fox News, Breitbart, and talk radio.
This evolution in the media bias argument illustrates how the right has come to use different metrics for conservative media and mainstream media. Inaccuracies in conservative media do not derail conservative personalities in the same way as Williams's inaccuracies have, because an argument can have factual inaccuracies but still be ideologically "true." Lacking those overt ideological claims, mainstream media can be discredited by being factually wrong.
That divergence has consequences, both troubling and absurd. It leads to the bizarre spectacle of people like Palin and the team at "Fox & Friends" holding themselves out as arbiters of accuracy. And the more that journalistic accuracy is associated [with] liberal bias, the more likely it is to become politicized. In an era when ideologues increasingly choose their own facts, the partisan policing of accuracy threatens to do in factuality altogether.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/13/inside-the-mercers-diy-media-empire.html
This is a piece about the Mercer Family Foundation:
In 2008, though, things started changing. The foundation cut a single check that was bigger than the previous two years’ contributions combined: a cool million bucks to the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank known for its efforts to discredit mainstream science on climate change. It also made the first of many contributions to a group called the Media Research Center, which rips mainstream media outlets and reporters for perceived liberal bias. All told, it gave five times as much money in 2008 as it did in 2007. The next year, the family’s foundation shelled out even more, including a contribution that was small but telling: $50,000 to the Council for National Policy, a nonprofit group comprised of the most influential social conservative leaders in the country—including, at least at one point, Donald Trump’s current campaign bosses, Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. In every subsequent year, the foundation has given the group $50,000, except in 2014, when the sum dipped to $25,000. In 2014, all told, it gave out $18.3 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/sunday/charlie-sykes-on-where-the-right-went-wrong.html
Charlie Skyes noting that the right (including himself) had long made an effort to discredit MSM:
One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.
That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored.
We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.
https://www.thenation.com/article/fake-news-is-not-the-real-media-threat-were-facing/
What the conservative media machine does, in tandem with its delegitimization of real news, is much more dangerous. Its leaders take any story that, however glancingly or speculatively, throws doubt upon the patriotism, honesty, or competence of public figures they dislike, and immediately cast it as the greatest outrage in American history. They return to it as often as possible, greeting every new revelation, however tiny or questionable, as a smoking gun.
Just for the Obama administration alone, the list of such scandals is almost endless: “Operation Fast and Furious”; the IRS auditing scandal; the supposed “ransom” paid to Iran as part of the nuclear deal; the loans made to the Solyndra solar panel company; alleged misdeed involving the Secret Service, the General Services Administration, and the EPA; Benghazi (Benghazi!); and of course Hillary Clinton’s e-mail.
Anyone relying on The New York Times for news over the past eight years would have seen little of genuine importance in most of these stories, and little to challenge the conclusion that Barack Obama has presided, by historical standards, over a virtually entirely scandal-free administration.
Anyone relying on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News would have seen in them a pattern of corruption and malevolence unmatched in American history, and one which the untrustworthy mainstream media deliberately covered up. This is not “fake news.” It is a blatantly ideological distortion of real news.
But, as Charlie Sykes has noted, because of the delegitimization of real news sources, the machine’s audiences simply do not, for the most part, believe it when any mainstream media outlet seeks to correct the distortions.
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/12/the...discredit-the-news-that-they-dont-agree-with/
This piece is worth the read just to see how many different views there are on right and left of what, exactly is "fake news" and who wants you to think their view is the only one worth having.