60% of Americans don't trust our mass media
According to a new Gallup Poll:
"Americans' confidence in the media has slowly eroded from a high of 55% in 1998 and 1999. Since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media. Trust has typically dipped in election years, including 2004, 2008, 2012 and last year. However, 2015 is not a major election year."
"This decline follows the same trajectory as Americans' confidence in our justice system and their declining trust in the federal government's ability to handle domestic and international problems over the same time period."
Bottom Line
Americans' trust level in the media has drifted downward over the past decade. The same forces behind the drop in trust in government more generally, as well confidence in many U.S. institutions, may also be at work with the media. But some of the loss in trust may have been self-inflicted. Major venerable news organizations have been caught making serious mistakes in the past several years, including the scandal involving former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in 2015 that some of his firsthand accounts of news events had been exaggerated or "misremembered."
According to another Gallup Poll, confidence in U.S. institutions is also below historical norms...
Americans' confidence in most major U.S. institutions remains below the historical average for each one. Only the military (72%) and small business (67%) -- the highest-rated institutions in this year's poll -- are currently rated higher than their historical norms, based on the percentage expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the institution.
Americans' confidence in all institutions over the last two years has been the lowest since Gallup began systematic updates of a larger set of institutions in 1993.
Source: Gallup Poll