Gallup revealed a waning trust in legacy media among eligible voters that went into overdrive in 2016.
Mediaite reports:
In the study published on Monday, Gallup presented a picture of the lowest trust ever recorded when it came to traditional media such as TV, newspapers, and radio. Gallup has conducted the same survey since 1972, and since 2016, that trust has continually waned. Just 31 percent of those surveyed said that they trusted the media to be accurate and fair a “great deal” or a “fair amount,” while 36 percent had “no trust at all,” which is a slight improvement over last year’s numbers. Thirty-three percent said they had “not very much” confidence.
The strongest indicators of low trust in media were age and political party, with Independents, Republicans and young people much significantly less likely to indicate trust in legacy media than Democrats and those over the age of 65.
Gallup explains:
Currently, 54% of Democrats, 27% of independents and 12% of Republicans say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. Independents’ trust matches the record low in 2022, while Democrats’ and Republicans’ are statistically similar to their historical low points.
An analysis by age groups using aggregated data to increase sample sizes shows a 17-percentage-point gap in trust between the oldest Americans (those aged 65 and older) and those under age 50 — 43% vs. 26%, respectively.
As far as age is concerned, there are multiple factors that could contribute to the disparity in trust in media between older and younger generations. Some of it could be based on habits, with seniors having a reputation of watching nightly news, reading newspapers and listening to talk radio, while some of it could have more to do with new media, and the staggering difference in narratives between what’s seen on social media versus traditional media — especially as it relates to hot button issues like Israel and Palestine, where platforms like Tik Tok tend to promote a pro-Palestine point of view, while established news channels are often sympathetic to Israel.
Following the 2016 election, many voters felt like major outlets that had been respected as balanced and objective for years abandoned journalistic integrity, and adopted practices that displayed blatant partisanship favoring the Democrats. This continued in 2020, and reached a fever pitch when Big Tech companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story and outlets like the New York Times cosigning the censorship, intentionally ignoring the story until it would no longer have meaningful consequences.
What were supposed to be trusted sources dismissed the laptop story as a conspiracy theory and “misinformation” only for the federal government to admit its validity over a year after the story was initially broken.
Gallup’s survey was conducted from September 3-15, 2024 on landline and cell phones with 1,007 voting-age adults from all 50 states and Washington, DC. The margin of sampling error was ±4 percentage points.
