By Brendan Scanland
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ trust in the mass media is at a record-low according to a new Gallup study.
Only about one-third of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” The study asked American adults, “In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?”
Gallup first asked the question in 1972 and has consistently measured it since 1997. The trend shows a steady decline in trust over time, but a pretty drastic drop after 2018.
In 1997, about 53% of Americans had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in media. This year, that number is only 31%.
When looking at media trust and party affiliation, the downward trend can be seen among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. In 1998, 59% of Democrats, 52% of Republicans and 53% of Independents had a great deal or fair amount of confidence. Over the years, that confidence has steadily declined for Republicans and Independents who now stand at 12% and 27% respectively.
The new numbers show 54% of Democrats have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media- not far off from the 59% in 1998. However, the 54% in 2024 is a 22-point drop from the 76% of Democrats who had a great deal or fair amount of trust in 2018.
“That was where there was a pinnacle of reporting on the Me Too movement,” said Dr. Sarah Fioroni, a senior researcher at Gallup. “There is a possibility that what was happening in the media at that time was a lot of investigative journalism, maybe it kind of gave a little bump in the confidence direction.”
Dr. Fioroni says there are a few reasons the 22-point drop among Democrats in the past six years is much greater than the nine-point drop for Republicans over the same period.
“Democrats have a much higher threshold for this. They have higher confidence in news, so there’s more room for them to go up and down. Whereas with Republicans, we’ve seen such a steady kind of bottoming out of confidence,” said Dr. Fioroni.
Additionally, Dr. Fioroni says a new generation of voters entered the survey sample around 2018: Gen Z.
“Between 2018 and today, we’ve had more and more Gen Z enter into our sample for the ‘over 18 population.’ And we do find in our polling and in looking at our long-term tracking that people under the age of 50 are where we see the biggest decline in confidence in news,” said Dr. Fioroni, who added that Gen Z was brought into an Internet-based news environment, where a wide range of information is available at one’s fingertips. “They grew up in a totally different news environment today than we saw a decade ago, two decades ago, and definitely back into the seventies when we first started polling on this.”
The Gallup study also showed Americans trust local news more than national news and have more positive attitudes toward local and state government than they do toward the federal government and Congress.
