According to a new Gallup poll, the American public distrusts the media more now than it has since they’ve began polling the question in 1998:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Distrust is up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004.
The record distrust in the media, based on a survey conducted Sept. 6-9, 2012, also means that negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year. This reflects the continuation of a pattern in which negativity increases every election year compared with the year prior. The current gap between negative and positive views — 20 percentage points — is by far the highest Gallup has recorded since it began regularly asking the question in the 1990s. Trust in the media was much higher, and more positive than negative, in the years prior to 2004 — as high as 72% when Gallup asked this question three times in the 1970s.
The record distrust in the media, based on a survey conducted Sept. 6-9, 2012, also means that negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year. This reflects the continuation of a pattern in which negativity increases every election year compared with the year prior. The current gap between negative and positive views — 20 percentage points — is by far the highest Gallup has recorded since it began regularly asking the question in the 1990s. Trust in the media was much higher, and more positive than negative, in the years prior to 2004 — as high as 72% when Gallup asked this question three times in the 1970s.
This year’s decline in media trust is driven by independents and Republicans. The 31% and 26%, respectively, who express a great deal or fair amount of trust are record lows and are down significantly from last year. Republicans’ level of trust this year is similar to what they expressed in the fall of 2008, implying that they are especially critical of election coverage.
Independents are sharply more negative compared with 2008, suggesting the group that is most closely divided between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney is quite dissatisfied with its ability to get fair and accurate news coverage of this election.
More broadly, Republicans continue to express the least trust in the media, while Democrats express the most. Independents’ trust fell below the majority level in 2004 and has continued to steadily decline.
Here’s the chart:
It’s not at all surprising that public trust in media has declined over the years. For one thing, it’s consistent with other Gallup polling we’ve seen in recent years that shows that a whole host of public institutions, political and non-political, which really started declining around the time of the Watergate scandal, has been declining precipitously. Indeed, according to the most recent such poll from Gallup, the only institution that receives a very high amount of trust from the public is the military, which is on itself given that the military is far more detached from the general public today than it was in the early 1970s when the draft was in effect. Given the trends for public institutions as a whole, then, it’s not all surprising that the news media has seen a fall from grace in the eyes of the public.
There are also, I would argue, other reasons that the media isn’t as trusted as it was in the days when Walter Cronkite would declare “That’s the way it is” as if a 22 minute newscast could possibly sum up what “it” is on a nightly basis. For one thing, there are more choices out there today than there were when we were basically stuck with three networks. In addition to the fact that one can easily choose not to watch the news at all given all the other entertainment options available, the extent to which news on cable has become so corrupted by ideology on both the left (MSNBC) and the right (Fox News Channel) makes it pretty easy to become cynical about the entire business of news to begin with. Add to that the fact that most of the major “news” coverage on the broadcast networks tends to focus on even important topics in the most banal and uninformative ways possible, and it’s easy to see why the reputation of the news business as a whole has declined in recent years.
Another factor that has likely contributed to the decline in the reputation of the news business in recent years are the revelations that have come out about what sometimes seems like an appalling lack of integrity by so-called “journalists. NBC’s Dateline made it’s infamous in the 1990s by faking tests to make it appear that cars were less safe than they actually are. Even major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have found themselves rocked by scandals ranging from plagiarism by journalists to outright fabrication of stories. Additionally, both sides of the political aisle continue to detect what they consider examples of media bias. Some of these claims of bias are unfair and overhyped, but just as many of them are spot-on recognition of the fact that many of the most watched and read journalists out there aren’t really journalists anymore, they’re reading press releases and taking points provided to them by politicians and interest groups.
Finally, the bizarre reality of our cable news networks, where more time is spent talking about what the news means rather than what the news is. You can see this most clearly in the coverage from all three cable networks (and much of the coverage on the broadcast networks) involves talking about who’s up or down in the polls, what’s going on inside various campaigns, or inane gaffes that the voters clearly don’t care about very much. When people turn on the political coverage and see talking heads talking about things that only resonate inside the Beltway, it’s not surprise that they turn away in disgust. Additionally, it strikes me that this entire model does harm to the reputation of journalism as a profession because the same people who are supposed to be reporting the facts are turning around and giving their opinions on those facts. There ought to be a brighter line between the two if journalists want people to start trusting them again.
There are many reasons to explain why the media isn’t trusted as much as it used to be, but the main reasons all revolve around one simple fact. The media has not earned the level of trust it once had, and that’s their fault.
