Gallup Records Highest Ever Level of Americans With No Trust At All in Mass Media As GOP Numbers Crater
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A new Gallup poll tracking Americans’ trust in mass media, published Tuesday, painted a bleak picture of the state of confidence in the media and highlighted a stark partisan divide.
For the first time since the poll began in 1972, more Americans chose “None at all” to describe their trust in mass media. While 34 percent of respondents chose “Great deal/Fair amount,” which is unchanged since last year and a two-point improvement from the record low of 2016, 38 percent chose “None at all” – a 4 point bump since last year.
Those respondents who chose “Not very much” to describe their trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” remained at 28 percent, virtually unchanged since 2017.
Gallup Poll
“This is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined,” noted the poll’s summary.
Broken down by partisan affiliation the numbers become even starker as the fall in Republicans’ trust in the mass media in the last 20 years is momentous.
“Americans’ trust in the media remains sharply polarized along partisan lines, with 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, and 27% of independents saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence,” notes the poll’s summary, adding:
There has been a consistent double-digit gap in trust between Democrats and Republicans since 2001, and that gap has ranged from 54 to 63 percentage points since 2017.
Gallup Poll
The historical graph shows that in 2002, 49 percent of Republicans still had a “great deal/Fair amount of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.” In 2022, that number had plummeted to just 14 percent.
Gallup’s Megan Brenan summarized the poll’s findings in the wider context of other recent surveys. “Americans’ confidence in the media has been anemic for nearly two decades, and Gallup’s latest findings further document that distrust. The current level of public trust in the media’s full, fair and accurate reporting of the news is the second lowest on record,” Brenan noted, adding:
This new confidence reading follows Gallup’s historically low confidence in both TV news and newspapers in June and a new low in December’s annual rating of the honesty and ethics of television reporters. Newspaper reporters received similarly low ratings in the same poll.
