A Crisis of Trust in America

by Trust in America

By Bennet Harvey

Americans’ overall trust in mass news media has been on a steep decline since the late 1970s, according to Gallup Group polling.  In 2022 the percentage of Citizens stating No Confidence in all exceeds both those with a Great Deal / Fair Amount, or Not Very Much trust and confidence in mass media news reporting.

When broken down by Citizens’ political affiliation, the picture is quite different.  Democrats have always had the most trust followed by Independents and then Republicans.  All Citizen trust descended in near parallel paths until 2016.  However, at that point the parties’ paths diverged dramatically.  In 2015 the gap was about 25%.  By 2018 the gap reached nearly 60%, and by 2020 it was 65%.

From 1996 to 2003 biannual election year data consistently shows Democrats’ movement of trust moving in the opposite direction from Republicans and Independents.  Beginning in 2003 all three political groups move together in the same direction, up or down, much more frequently than before 2003.  

The data below clearly shows the distribution of trust in news media acros the political spectrum.

The Gallup Trust Data by party totaled from 2020 to 2022 are broken out below by Age, Political Ideology, and Education.  

  • By Age the data shows that trust increases by age for Democrats and Independents, but for Republicans the middle age range is lowest by more than half.
  • By Political Ideology Democrats have consistently high trust in news media.  Independents trust declines from liberal to moderate to conservative.  Moderate Republicans trust in news media is twice the level of conservative Republicans.
  • College Education does not distinguish between Democrats or between Republicans.  College Educated Independents have nearly 50% more trust than Independents without college education. 

Declining trust in news media is accompanied by news fatigue across the political spectrum.  Lower rating of news quality aligns with greater news fatigue.

Republicans more than Democrats feel they are misunderstood by news media.  Among Democrats, lower interest in the news corresponds with a greater feeling of being misunderstood by news media.

The Gallup data below from July 2017 shows the consistent decline in trust across public institutions.  Only the Military and Small Business saw gains in trust in recent decades.  All others saw dramatic declines.  News media is near the bottom spot held by Congress. 

  • Trust in Newspapers declines by 27 points from 51% to 24%.
  • Trust in Television News declined 25 points from 46% to 21%. 

 

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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Americans’ Trust In Media Remains Near Record Low

by Trust in America

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • 34% have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in media
  • 38% with no trust at all outpaces great deal/fair amount for first time
  • 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, 27% of independents trust media

WASHINGTON, D.C. — At 34%, Americans’ trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” is essentially unchanged from last year and just two points higher than the lowest that Gallup has recorded, in 2016 during the presidential campaign.

Just 7% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have “a fair amount.” Meanwhile, 28% of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably, 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.

These data are from a Sept. 1-16 Gallup poll, which, in addition to the low rating for the fourth estate, also found weak confidence ratings for the three branches of government.

The percentage of Americans with a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media has not been at the majority level since 2003, although before that — in three readings in the 1970s and seven readings between 1997 and 2003 — it was the norm. The public’s confidence rating for the media has averaged 42% since 2004.

Partisan Divide in Media Trust Persists

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.

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.

There are several notable findings in the degrees of trust registered by partisans:

  • For the third straight year, the majority of Republicans indicate that they have no trust at all in the media. This figure jumped 10 percentage points in 2020 and has been at or near 60% since then. This year, 57% say they do not have any confidence, while 29% say they do not have very much.
  • At 27%, independents’ confidence is at the lowest point in the trend. This is also the first time that it has fallen below 30%. Meanwhile, 41% of independents say they have no trust at all and 32% do not have very much.
  • While the great deal/fair amount of confidence reading among Democrats has never fallen below the majority level, the proportion with a great deal of trust has not topped 26%, and it is currently well below that at 18%.

There are some significant differences within several subgroups of partisans. These findings are based on aggregated data from 2020 through 2022, which allow for sample sizes that are sufficient for analysis.

  • There is a clear pattern by age, whereby older Democrats and independents are more trusting of the media than their younger counterparts.
  • While liberal and moderate Democrats register roughly equal levels of trust in the media, independents’ trust differs markedly, based on their political ideology: Those who describe themselves as liberal are the most confident, and conservatives are the least confident. This pattern is similar among moderate and conservative Republicans, though it is somewhat less stark of a difference. (There were not ample numbers of liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats to perform meaningful analysis among these groups.)
  • Independents with a college degree are more likely than those without a degree to express trust in the media, but there are no differences among Democrats or Republicans based on college education.

Bottom Line

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. 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.

Partisans remain sharply divided in their views of the media, with most Democrats versus few Republicans trusting it. These divisions are entrenched and show no signs of abating.