Written by Frank Newport

NBC News Managing Editor and Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has been suspended without pay for six months as a result of his superiors’ determination that he “misrepresented events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War,” and also about concerns that occurred while he was “talking about his experiences in the field” outside of NBC News.

Will this affect Americans’ trust in the media? It could, but it’s important to keep in mind that such trust is already as low as it has been since Gallup began measuring it.

Each September we track a measure of trust in “…the mass media, such as newspapers, TV and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly…” The accompanying graph shows the trend since 1997, with the “great deal”/”fair amount” of trust category dropping from as high as 55% in 1999 to a low of 40% both in 2012 and in 2014.

We also ask Americans to rate their confidence in television news in our annual Confidence in Institutions poll conducted each June. Overall in 2014, only 18% of Americans said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news, putting it next-to-last on the list of 16 institutions tested, ranking above only Congress (which has a 7% confidence rating). Television news was the lowest rated of the three media sources tested, slightly below Internet news and even further behind newspapers.

This 18% confidence rating in television news is the lowest on record since Gallup began tracking it in 1993, when confidence in this medium was at 46%.

Thus, this latest media controversy has played out in the context of pre-existing and declining trust in the mass media and in television news. The Williams situation will reinforce this existing and negative perception of news media and may possibly accelerate that trend — unless the fairly rapid action by NBC News executives to remove Williams from the air encourages some Americans to believe that the base news organizations themselves retain a commitment to accuracy.

One of the contextual issues here is the impact of efforts by television news producers to stem the decline in their programs’ ratings. Either formally or informally, producers of television news shows have clearly decided that so-called straight news isn’t enough to deter the erosion of viewers. These producers have increasingly turned to efforts to enhance the news with what they hope will be a more enticing entertainment focus. ABC World News Tonight, for example, spends the back-end of its 30-minute broadcast on soft news — larded with eye-catching video, lifestyle and celebrity stories, and much else that is far from what one would have seen in the old Peter Jennings days. Brian Williams himself, no doubt, reasoned that his appearances in non-news settings such as the Late Show with David Letterman broadened his appeal beyond just those who traditionally seek old-fashioned hard news. Of course, as has been discussed in great detail, appearing in these types of entertainment venues demand that one be entertaining, which in turn can lead to a desire to develop arresting and attention-grabbing anecdotes and stories from the field.

The Williams situation didn’t involve specifically liberal versus conservative issues. We know, however, that there has been an increasing divide in trust in the mass news media across partisan lines. Republicans are now half as likely as Democrats to say they trust the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.

In theory, mainstream networks and their news departments can position themselves as a few of the remaining non-ideological news outlets — eschewing, as they have, the temptation to hunt down ratings by catering to one side of the ideological spectrum or the other, as is the case for cable news channels and radio talk shows.

Brian Williams’ problems probably don’t help the networks if this is the way they are intending to go. His actions were not explicitly ideological, as noted, but they are most likely going to reinforce the existing negative views of the mainstream media, including network television news, among Republicans and independents, and may depress these views among Democrats as well.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well.

This article was originally posted at the Gallup website.

Sometimes we’re able to float through life blissfully unaware of the offal that the television, movie, cable, and video-streaming industries feed the culture. Often, we have a remarkable capacity for ingesting it and ignoring the vomit that results from ingesting offal. Other times, the stench from the offal and the vomit are just too much. That’s what’s happened to me.

The first outrage was hearing that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams regularly watches his own daughter, Allison Williams, who is an actress on the vulgar HBO program Girls. In a recent episode, there was a brief scene in which a young man performs a sex act on her which I can’t describe in even general terms in this article. When questioned, her father offered this silly dismissal of his peculiar TV viewing habit:

She’s always been an actress. For us, watching her is the family occupation and everybody has to remember it’s acting, no animals were harmed during the filming, and ideally nobody gets hurt.

Then, last week, I learned that ABC is producing a sitcom based on the life of nasty, brutish, obscene sex columnist (and Chicago native) Dan Savage. This is the man who at a journalism conference for high school students insulted Christians and then, like a middle-school bully, hurled the anti-“gay” epithet “pansies” at those students who walked out. At a college speaking engagement, the savage Savage described conservative Christians as bat sh*t, a*sh*le, dou**ebags. And in his columns and on college tours, he cheerfully endorses threesomes and sexual practices that involve excrement.

The proverbial last straw that led to this article came yesterday when I was made aware that the puerile hosts of the Today Show are spending two entire weeks tittering about and promoting Fifty Shades of Grey, the softcore porn movie based on the hardcore porn novel. Yes, some will argue that because everything is relative and there are far more sexually explicit novels, Fifty Shades of Grey is not hardcore porn. But I joyfully reject the false belief that everything is relative and, therefore, I feel no compunction about describing Fifty Shades of Grey as hardcore porn.

For those who have been living on a compound in a cave on a remote island, Fifty Shades of Grey is the novelistic offal that extols the wonders of “bondage and discipline,” sadism, and masochism (BDSM) that child-women have been devouring. The stars are Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and Jamie Dornan, a married Irish actor and father of a baby girl.

Here are some of the profoundly sad comments Dakota Johnson made in a CNN interview:

It’s stressful enough to be tied to a bed naked in a scene. But then they call cut, and you’re still tied to the bed, naked. Jamie would be the first one to throw a blanket over me….I don’t want my family to see [the movie], because it’s inappropriate. Or my brothers’ friends, who I grew up with.

Dakota Johnson’s response reveals the incoherence of her belief system: While recognizing the truth that there are things regarding her body that her family shouldn’t see, she fails to recognize that the world should not see these things either.

Whether actors realize it or not, the belief that the profession of acting renders nudity and erotic interactions with acquaintances morally justifiable reflects the human tendency toward Gnosticism. Gnosticism holds a dim view of materiality including physical embodiment and seeks to sever the inseverable link between body and spirit. Peter Burfeind explains how Gnostic thought shapes the prevailing cultural view of the body:

[T]he Gnostic reading of humanity…says the Self has nothing to do with the physical body, but rather the body is nothing more than vesture to be tailored any way one wants.

It’s all rooted in the narrative of one’s “Self” being liberated from the stifling oppression of the body and its various determinations…, rooted in the Gnostic notion that life is the story of the Self’s liberation from (or reconstituting of)…bodily realities in order to pursue the heroic journey of Self-divinization.

Nudity and erotic interactions always have meaning, which is why nudity and erotic interactions in theatrical performances are wrong. The body cannot be separated from the spirit. One can portray  another character through language, costuming, and movement, but one cannot be so wholly transformed that nudity and erotic interactions become the acts of someone else. In Dakota Johnson’s desire to be covered immediately after filming a sex scene and her desire that her family and brothers’ friends not see her movie, she apprehends something true that evidently escapes Brian Williams.

In the CNN interview, Jamie Dornan revealed the challenges of doing the BDSM scenes:

Some of the Red Room stuff was uncomfortable. There were times when Dakota was not wearing much, and I had to do stuff to her that I’d never choose to do to a woman.

A man of integrity would refuse to be in a room with an unclothed woman, doing dishonorable things to her. Claiming the mantle of actor does not render Dornan’s actions honorable. Dakota Johnson, the young woman, was in reality unclothed and Dornan did dishonorable things to her—not to a character—but to her. And worse still, he did them so that the whole world could see.

If nudity is morally defensible as long as one is acting, and if touching what we tell our children are “private parts” of someone with whom you have no intimate relationship is morally defensible as long as one is acting, then would it be morally defensible for Don Johnson to have acted with his daughter in the Jamie Dornan role? If not, why not?

Dakota Johnson reveals too an impoverished view of female empowerment:

[I]f I can be an advocate for women to do what they want with their bodies and not be ashamed of what they want, then I’m all for that.

Female flourishing and freedom do not come from unfettered bodily autonomy but from knowing and doing the will of God. And God does not desire that women engage in sexual acts that degrade and inflict pain on them with men to whom they are not married. Nor does God desire that actresses perform in movies or plays that call for them to be unclothed or touched intimately by men. While Fifty Shades of Grey seeks to depict liberation through titillating, boundary-pushing imagery, in reality, it serves to enslave women in the same sexual grip that has historically enslaved only men.

The Today Show is contributing to the cultural hyperventilation about this tacky movie made from a poorly written, tacky book by showing clips from the movie every day this week, having an advance showing for fans, hosting a contest in which fans are asked to write captions for different scenes, and inviting actors to the show to discuss the movie.

So far, not one guest has been invited to discuss seriously the meaning and effect of this cultural phenomenon on an understanding of sexuality and human flourishing. No discussion thus far of the gnostic aspects that appearing in such a movie signifies. No expressions of sadness about the debasement of women that the movie both reflects and encourages. No shame that teens may be ingesting this offal.

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