Just when you thought the legacy media couldn't crater any lower, they find a new floor. A new Gallup survey finds just 28% of Americans now trust mass media, the lowest number ever recorded, and down from 70% when the poll was first taken in the 1970s. Among individual groups, the numbers are even more stark. While 51% of Democrats still trust the media, that's down 25 points from just seven years ago. Meanwhile, just 27% of independents and only 8% of Republicans trust mass media.
Trust in mainstream media has been steadily declining since the rise of the internet and conservative talk radio in the 1990s, but it has accelerated in the Trump era. And it seems the worse it gets, the more legacy media outlets ignore it. "News consumers are indeed sending messages to the mainstream media, and the mainstream media is not listening," says Jeff McCall, media studies professor at DePauw University. "If you don't trust news organizations, you're not going to consume news from them, so it's not a surprise that news consumers are going elsewhere to get their news."
What is a surprise is legacy outlets have not made any course correction. Just last month, new evidence showed how they misled the public about the economy leading up to last year's election, and this year has brought the same anti-Trump coverage that we saw during President Trump's first term. "I'm concerned that some of these major news organizations really don't care if they win back our trust," says McCall. "Because they're so committed to their activist agenda, and so convinced they're right, that they're willing to overlook the fact that people are leaving the audience in droves."
Since the media does not appear to be changing its ways anytime soon, McCall expects those trust numbers to continue to plummet even further. "They seem oblivious to how bad this looks for them but also for our nation," he says. "And for the future of a democracy that relies on the free flow of credible information to audiences that can then act upon it."
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