Media Trust Hits All-Time Low: Less than Half of Americans Trust Traditional News
Trust hits low of 46% for the first time ever
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Trust in the establishment media has plummeted to an all-time low in the run-up to the inauguration of Joe Biden.
Americans' faith in government and the media is now below half at 46% for the first time ever.
Though the trust in the media has been declining gradually over the last ten years, it has now disappeared entirely for many Americans.
According to data from Edelman's annual trust barometer shared with Axios, less than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media.
Also, since the recent big tech censorship ramped up, most notably censoring President Donald Trump's Twitter and Facebook accounts, social media trust has hit an all-time low of 27%.
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According to Axios:
- 56% of Americans agree with the statement that "Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."
- 58% think that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public."
- When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.
President Trump's war on "fake news," where he called out the partisan biased of many left-wing news outlets, has also contributed to the drop.
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Vaccine rumor hunter Heidi Larson argued, "we don’t have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.”
Last year, Neon Nettle reported the key finding of “low levels of public trust in the nation’s polarized media environment” arrived in a survey by the Knight Foundation and Gallup Inc., which tracks public sentiment about media.
Pollsters found a general consensus that the media was necessary to ward off misinformation, but few Americans believe the press is doing it properly.
“Most Americans have lost confidence in the media to deliver the news objectively,” said Sam Gill, Knight’s senior vice president and chief program officer.
“This is corrosive for our democracy.”
According to the poll, more Republicans (71%) than Democrats (22%) and independents (52%) have unfavorable opinions of the media.
“It basically is confirming what various other studies have shown,” Penny Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, told The Washington Times.
“I think that it’s what we found over and over and over again is when you’re not getting local news, your only source of news is either television or the internet, and 90% of what you get is going tone national in scope,” Ms. Abernathy said.
