• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 30, 2018

There is higher TV news viewership and more consumption of news via social-media platforms. This is the current environment we live in, according to reports.

And yet there is something wrong with this picture.

A "trust" survey of the media found 63% of U.S. respondents say they do not know how to distinguish good journalism from rumor or falsehoods, with 59% saying it is getting harder to tell if a piece of news was produced by a specific media organization.

This comes from the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual online 30-minute survey of more than 33,000 respondents in 28 countries. The survey was conducted between October 28 and November 20, 2017.

What this seems to mean for TV viewers: They want to know more about current news. But it is going to take a lot more of their media time to figure it out.

If you are a TV news network this is good news -- and bad news. The good is that TV viewers will spend more time in consuming crucial TV news issues -- including political, business, global warming and security.

The bad news is that TV consumers can only handle so much. So many might need a shortcut. And that’s where social media comes in -- with bits of legitimate news content (or not) and bits of news content poised as advertising content (or not).

TV news was the only programming category to witness viewership and advertising gains in 2017.

For example, CNN was up 29% and MSNBC was 101% higher. (Fox News was down 3%, when it came to person-hours on a Nielsen live-plus-same-day data basis across all dayparts and all people, according to Brian Wieser, senior research analyst of Pivotal Research Group.) Collectively, all three cablers were up 15% in 2017 versus the year before.

Standard Media Index says across all TV platforms, TV news climbed 4.1% in terms of advertising revenue.

So there is good business and solid engagement. But how to make it better? Consumers seem to be figuring that out -- slowly.

Here is what the survey also says: Trust in traditional journalism jumped five points to 59% -- a six-year high. With social media (48%) and search engines (25%) enduring a six-year low.