Commentary
Trust In News Outlets Falls To Recent Low, Especially Among Republicans
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, August 30, 2021
Trust in news media -- both national and local outlets -- has fallen precipitously since the 2020 election, and most of it comes from the growing skepticism of Republican voters, according to the latest in a series of tracking studies conducted by the Pew Research Center.
While the news media trust levels of Democrats or Democratic-leaning voters have also eroded slightly, the dramatic decline among Americans overall has been driven by the partisan divide of Republicans, which has fallen to only 35% who trust national news organizations, and 66% for local news organizations.
According to Pew's tracking, social media remains the lowest level of trust for news information among all Americans, but has fallen to just 19% of Republicans/Republican-leaning voters.
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Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
Joe, the problem with this kind of research is that it matters greatly what kind of "news" is being reported. I would bet that if Pew broke down the term "news" by category---like weather/ storms, sports, the economy, world events, politics, racial bias, Covid-19, getting vaccinated, etc. that many of those who say they don't trust the national news organizations, have no problem with them when it comes to the weather, sports, economic matters , etc. but that they are very distrustful when the "news" is about politics, race relations and Covid-19 because they have been convinced that such reporting is biased relative to their own core beliefs. I wish that Pew would provide such detail as it seems clear that this downward trend in national news credibility is primarily political---and misinformation-driven. Which is why local news always scores so well---it deals only lightly with the national political scene and its vitriol.