The public doesn’t trust Big Media. Who could have foreseen this riveting data from the folks at Gallup? Anyone with a brain.
Americans’ trust in the “mass media” is at its lowest point in more than 50 years according to Gallup data released this week. And based on polling reactions by age, the future of news is bleak, because people under 50 trust news media even less than those over 65.
About 36 percent of Americans say they have “no trust at all” in the media to report news “fully, accurately and fairly,” which is up from 6 percent in 1972, Gallup’s data shows. Thirty-three percent of respondents say they do not trust it “very much.” As Gallup notes, trust has been trending down since 2003.
Fewer Republicans trust the news compared to Democrats, with 59 percent of Republicans saying they have zero trust in the mass media. This number surpassed 50 percent for Republicans for the first time in 2020 and has never recovered.
According to the poll, 42 percent of independents say they have no trust “at all” in the media. But just 6 percent of Democrats hold that view; most Democrats are apparently still buying whatever the media is selling.
Public confidence in the media is also low when compared to other institutions. Gallup’s ranking of Americans’ confidence in certain institutions places television and print news at the bottom of the list, with print news outranking television news. The only institution Americans have less confidence in is Congress.
The reason for media mistrust is obvious: They have been proven untrustworthy. The Federalist’s Elections Editor, Elle Purnell, recently listed some of the media’s biggest scams, including Russiagate, the Kavanaugh rape hoax, and the Pete Hegseth smears.
“They’re the ones who told you that the Hunter Biden laptop was almost certainly Russian disinformation, that Trump called American soldiers ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ that Covid definitely didn’t escape from a lab, that Trump wanted to execute Liz Cheney by firing squad, and that J.D. Vance was weird,” Purnell wrote.
These are some of the well-known hoaxes that have contributed to the public’s plummeting faith in media, but there are daily examples of media incompetency. Monitor The Federalist’s media watchdog page and hoax trackers for reporting highlighting the unreliability of Big Media.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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