Quick show of hands: How many of you celebrated World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday?

That’s what we thought.

Our lack of enthusiasm for the Fourth Estate, though, didn’t prevent the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights from releasing a poll showing just how far its profession has fallen, and just how united the American people are in affixing blame to them for the nation’s polarization.

Almost three-fourths of the public blame the news media for our sorry state of political hatred and — shocker alert — nearly half of us have “little to no trust” in the media’s ability to “fairly and accurately” report the news.

In addition, as the AP ruefully reports: “Four in 10 say the press is doing more to hurt American democracy, while only about 2 in 10 say the press is doing more to protect it. An additional 4 in 10 say neither applies.” (It’s a republic, not a democracy, but whatever.)

It’s perhaps a sign of corporate media’s cluelessness that this poll from its flagship bureau failed to even touch upon the subject that’s at the heart of so much of what we loath in today’s news media — namely, the phenomenon of selection bias. As Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw rightly observes:

The mainstream press doesn’t have to deliver false or heavily spun reports to do damage. They can accomplish a lot more by simply ignoring stories. Take, for example, the difference between recent House revelations about the dodgy financial dealing of Biden Incorporated and the show trial(s) against former President Trump. The Media Research Center found that between March 16 and April 5, the major alphabet news outlets (ABC, NBC, CBS) spent 10 hours, 58 minutes, and 17 seconds covering Trump investigation stories. During that same period, they spent exactly zero seconds talking about the Biden family’s financial corruption reports. Not one mention was seen.

The AP poll, of course, comes on the heels of CNN’s long-overdue defenestration of the journalistic cartoon character known as Don Lemon and Fox News’s disastrous and as of yet utterly unwarranted firing of the UFO-chasing but otherwise largely spot-on Tucker Carlson.

The former was greeted mostly with yawns, but the latter fairly shook the world of American news media. And ever since then, the mainstream media has been doing its worst to smear Carlson as a racist and a sexist and a transphobist, along with a few other phobisms phoned in for good measure.

In a recently leaked text message, for example, Carlson observed — upon seeing footage of a group of Trump supporters ganging up on a hapless antifa thug — that this wasn’t “how white men fight.”

Apparently, as The New York Times reported, some lily-livered members of Fox News’s board found out about this painful but generally and demonstrably accurate observation just before the network’s embarrassing Dominion Voting Systems trial was to begin. And the rest, as they say, is history. Carlson, to the network’s eternal shame, was unceremoniously fired on Monday, April 24, less than a week after Fox coughed up nearly $800 million to Dominion.

If that weren’t enough, however, the Fox-obsessed arugula-eating Soros monkeys at Media Matters also released “hot mic” moments of Carlson not once, not twice, but three times in recent days. As the AP reports: “In one, Carlson is seen speaking to someone offscreen disparaging Fox’s streaming service, Fox Nation. In another, he shares offscreen sexual banter with Piers Morgan before an interview, commenting to someone offscreen that a person’s girlfriend ‘was kind of yummy.’ He is also heard saying how he waits for his ‘post-menopausal fans’ to make comments about his appearance.”

In other words, Fox Nation is meh compared to the regular Fox lineup, Carlson is a red-blooded heterosexual male, and some of his fans are older women.

The horrors. If that isn’t worth Fox News giving its bravest, most interesting, most compelling, and most popular personality the gate and suddenly losing the primetime ratings game to lowly MSNBC, well, we don’t know what is.

In any case, the network has taken a pounding since Carlson’s departure. As PJ Media’s Stephen Green writes: “Tucker Carlson had 270,000 viewers in the 25-to-54-year-old demo on his last night at Fox News and the top-rated cable news show. One week later, his (temporary?) replacement, Fox News Tonight, had just 110,000 demo viewers and had dropped to 16th place. The numbers got worse as the week dragged on for the once-mighty 8 p.m. Fox time slot.”

And as another media watcher notes: “Young people have abandoned Fox News in primetime with Hannity now below 100k in the demo and Tucker’s old time slot losing more than 70% of its young audience. Catastrophic.”

More than 70% of its future, eh? Perhaps that’s why so many recent sightings of Tucker seem to show him so schadenfreudy. Perhaps it’s because he is.

At least Fox News funnyman Greg Gutfeld gets it. Weighing in on the Media Matters revelations, he came to Carlson’s defense: “Apparently,” Gutfeld said, “everyone understands nonsense banter between segments except for hall monitor failures bitterly chronicling the lives of the far more successful.”

Good for Gutfeld. No wonder he’s The King of Late Night.