By Paul Craig Roberts

September 17, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - The latest from the Gallup Poll is that only 32% of Amerians trust the print and TV media to tell the truth.

Republicans, 18 to 49 year old Americans, and independents trust the media even less, with trust rates of 14%, 26%, and 30%.

The only group that can produce a majority that still trusts the media are Democrats with a 51% trust rate in print and TV reporting. The next highest trust rate is Americans over 50 years of age with a trust rate of 38 percent.

The conclusion is that old people who are Democrats are the only remaining group that barely trusts the media. This mistaken trust is due to their enculturation. For older Democrats belief in government takes the place of Republican belief in evangelical Christianity. Older Democrats are firm believers that it was government under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that saved America from the Great Depression. As the print and TV media in the 21st century are firmly aligned with the government, the trust in government spills over into trust of the media that is serving the government. As the generation of Democrats enculturated with this mythology die off, Democratic trust rates will plummet toward Republican levels.

It is not difficult to see why trust in the media has collapsed. The corrupt Clinton regime, which we might be on the verge of repeating, allowed a somewhat diverse and independent media to be 90% acquired by six mega-corporations. The result was the disappearance of independence in reporting and opinion.

The constraints that corporate ownership and drive for profits put on journalistic freedom and resources reduced reporting to regurgitations of government and corporate press releases, always the cheapest and uncontroversial way to report.

With journalistic families driven out of journalism by estate taxes, the few remaining newspapers become acquisitions like a trophy wife or a collector Ferrari. Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of amazon.com, handed over $250 million in cash for the Washington Post. Jeff might be a whiz in e-commerce, but when it comes to journalism he could just as well be named Jeff Bozo.

On September 12, Washington Post reporter Cindy Boren dropped the Washington Post below the level of the supermarket tabloid, National Enquirer. One must wonder where her editor was. Drunk perhaps? The Washington Post actually reported that a Nigerian MD, Bennet Omalu, “whose credentials and tenacity are well known,” has concluded that Hillary Clinton’s obvious medical problems could be due to her being poisoned by a Putin-Trump conspiracy.

One could possibly conclude that Cindy Boren and her Washington Post editor were having fun with Omalu, except that the article repeated the unfounded allegation that circumstantial evidence according to a UK inquiry associates Putin with the poisoning death of Litvinenko.

In other words, first Litvinenko, now Hillary.

If circumstantial evidence is to be the Washington Post’s guide, then clearly that evidence suggests that the neoconservatives, well-ensconced in high government positions and desperate for a New Pearl Harbor in order to launch their wars of hegemony in the Middle East, are responsible for 9/11.

Yet the Washington Post has a full-time reporter whose job is to disparage conspiracy theories while the Washington Post itself launches the conspiracy theory of the century: Putin And Trump Conspiracy Poisons US Democratic Candidate for President.

If intelligence, or perhaps simply sufficient time in Americans’ lives to investigate the news, were not in such short supply, possibly Americans would reflect on what the benefit is of being driven by Washington into conflict with Russia and China.

It most certainly will not be victory in war, as we all will be dead.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.