According to newly-released Pew polls CNN is trusted by only about 1/3 of its readers.  The funny part?  That really does make CNN “the most trusted name in news.”

“Over the last 10 years,” the just-released biennial news consumption survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press determined, “virtually every news organization or program has seen its credibility marks decline” and “Democrats continue to give most news organizations much higher credibility ratings than do Republicans.”

Based on past Pew polls, CNN touts itself as “the most trusted name in news,” but the percent who “believe all or most” of what CNN reports has fallen 12 points, to 30 percent, since Pew first posed the question in 1998. Yet, in a sign of how far the news media have fallen in the eyes of the public, that puts CNN at the top of the 12 television news outlets analyzed, as well as above all the newspapers and online sources. Believability for ABC News, CBS News and NBC News is down six points over the past ten years, to 24 percent for ABC and NBC, 22 percent for CBS, but that’s still better than the mere 18 percent who “believe all or most” of what they read in the New York Times. 

Personally, I think this is great.  In fact, I’d be worried if Americans trusted what they saw on television or read in a publication/on the internet.  I don’t want to go back to the era where Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, because that wasn’t a healthy time for our democracy.  Trusting people like Walter Cronkite, and his more modern counterparts, gives those people far too much power over our thoughts and opinions.

We should base our opinions about what is true and what isn’t upon our own review on the fact, not on who told us what.  We are living in an age where CBS News cooked up some forged memo to impugn the character of a sitting President, and the National Enquirer was the best source of news on the John Edwards affair.  The time when we could turn on the television, or open a newspaper (or heck even open up a website like this one) and believe what we see there without questioning it is over.

If there ever was a time when such a thing were possible.