Trust In News Media Lowest In 50 Years (Gallup)
Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse
It’s been my observation and concern for decades that journalism (especially national journalism) in the United States was losing its focus on the importance of building ‘trust’ with news consumers. There was a time when audiences believed what they saw on a television newscast, heard on a radio newscast, or read in a newspaper. Unfortunately, too many journalists and their managers no longer care as much about finding, confirming, and reporting truth as they are about pushing personal or corporate narratives.
I’ve written about this problem so many times for so many years that you may wonder why I bother to write another article about it. Maybe it’s because I remember a time as a journalist more than 50 years ago when the vast majority of the American public had a high regard for the work we did every day to bring them news they could trust.
Honesty, integrity, and a lack of bias in journalism are challenging because journalists are human. Most humans are biased. Most journalists have a personal perspective about the news they report (e.g. personal opinions, viewpoints, etc.). That’s why the way journalists are trained in school and in their first jobs, and the way managers supervised them, are so important. They should know how to deal with their biases and report news accurately and objectively. Unfortunately, we have watched the growth of ‘activist’ journalism during the past few decades.
A journalist has to be willing to stand strong for honest, non-activist, journalism even if other journalists (including news managers and media owners) oppose, ignore, or even threaten them.
I keep thinking that if journalists could only see how much trust they’ve lost among their audience, they might change their ways. Call me old fashioned, but I am still optimistic that Real Journalism exists in the hearts of some journalists - hopefully, in young journalists who will be the future of journalism in the coming decades.
With that short introduction, I give you the latest Gallup poll about how Americans view the news media and why. Gallup’s blog article from February 27, 2025 is called Five Key Insights Into Americans' Views of the News Media. Here are highlights from the poll —
Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades.
Trust in media has dropped precipitously in recent years, particularly among young adults and Republicans.
Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.
Republicans' lack of trust in the mass media has surged in the Trump era.
Republicans’ lack of trust in the media topped 50% for the first time in 2020 and has since remained at the majority level. Lack of trust is also up sharply among independents, now 42%, while it continues to be low -- 6% this year -- among Democrats.
Generational patterns don’t bode well for media trust in the future.
An analysis of combined 2022-2024 data to increase sample sizes shows a 17-point gap in trust between the oldest Americans (those aged 65 and older) and those under age 50 -- 43% vs. 26%, respectively.
Confidence in news has fallen more than confidence in other institutions.
Gallup annually measures confidence in a variety of U.S. public institutions, and in 2024, as in recent years, news media institutions -- specifically, newspaper and television news -- ranked at the bottom, just above Congress.
Print news professions are rated slightly better than their television counterparts.
Gallup’s annual measurement of the perceived honesty and ethics of people in various professions finds a steep decline in Americans' trust in news professionals' honesty and ethics, with television reporters experiencing a sharper drop than newspaper reporters and journalists.
I share this with you as a gentle reminder. Whether you are a journalist, news manager, owner of a media outlet, a journalism professor, work in public relations or corporate communications, the message is the same. The American public needs a return to honesty and objectivity in journalists and communication specialists to bring truthful information to them every day — however you deliver it to them.
Think about it, please.
Comments and Questions Welcome
I hope these thoughts are helpful to you. Please share your comments and questions and I will respond as quickly as I can. If you like what we’re doing in this newsletter, please let your friends know about it so they can subscribe.
Newsletter Purpose
The purpose of this newsletter is to help people who work in the fields of journalism, media, and communications find ways to do their jobs that are personally fulfilling and helpful to others. I also want to help news consumers know how to find news sources they can trust.
[The Real Journalism Newsletter is published every other Tuesday morning — unless there’s ‘breaking news!]
