Gallup: A Record High For Americans’ Distrust In Media
More and more, Americans aren’t believing what they see/hear/read from the nation’s media:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% now saying this is a record high by one percentage point.
The 43% of Americans who, in Gallup’s annual Governance poll, conducted Sept. 13-16, 2010, express a great deal or fair amount of trust ties the record low, and is far worse than three prior Gallup readings on this measure from the 1970s.
And the problem, it seems, isn’t Fox News as some liberals would have it. Rather, it would seem as though these numbers would explain the consistently dominant viewer ratings Fox (and conservative talk radio too, perhaps) gets as the overwhelmingly plurality of respondents said that the media has a liberal bias:
Democrats/liberals are the group most likely to trust the media. Republicans/conservatives are the group least likely to trust the media. Moderates/independents are somewhere in between.
The moral of the story: Americans don’t trust the media, and they don’t trust it because it’s got a liberal bias.
Tags: gallup, journalism, media bias, poll
