American Trust in Media Falls to Decade Low, Gallup Poll Says
Americans' trust in the media to report news accurately has fallen to considerable lows, recent polling shows.
The latest Gallup poll of confidence in the media has found that Americans have trusted print and television news less and less over the past decade, Al Jazeera America reported.
Just one-fifth of Americans still have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in all three formats of news -- print, television and online.
Americans trust print most, but not by much. Print media got love from 22 percent of the poll's responders, while 19 percent said they trust news from the Internet and 18 percent trust television news coverage.
Print media peaked in 1979, with 51 percent of responders trusting the format. Television news' high was a 46 percent confidence rating in 1993, when polling on that subject began. The poll didn't begin asking about online media until 1999, when 21 percent of responders said they trusted news from the Internet.
The study also measured the confidence of newspapers and television media based on ideology. It found that 15 percent of conservatives still "have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, tied with the 10-year low." The percentage of conservatives who trust newspapers has nearly halved in the last decade.
Liberals remain relatively strong supporters of print media, which they rated at 34 percent, while 24 percent of moderates had confidence in newspapers, according to the poll.
Television news confidence values for conservatives and liberals are close: 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively. In 2013, 26 percent of liberals said they trusted television media.
According to Al Jazeera, the dreary findings reveal that the traditional formats of news are losing the "ability to influence public opinion and political debate." Online media will soon have more influence on the American public than television and print if trends continue.
"Amid this rapid change, Americans hold all news media platforms in low confidence," Gallup's Andrew Dugan wrote. "How these platforms can restore confidence with the American public is not clear, especially as editorial standards change and most outlets lack the broad reach once available to major newspapers and broadcasters."
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