Six times as many Americans distrust the media compared to 1972, while the portion that trusts the media has fallen by more than half, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.
Over a third of Americans, 36%, said they had “no trust” in mass media outlets in 2024, compared to only 6% in 1972, according to Gallup’s survey conducted from June 2-23, 2024, while another 33% said they did not have “very much” trust in media. The number of Americans who said they had “a great deal” or “fair amount of trust” in the media dropped to 31% in 2024 from a high of 72% in 1976.
Newspapers and cable news had lower net trust ratings than Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidency, according to Gallup. In terms of partisan breakdown, 59% of Republicans and 42% of independents told the polling firm they didn’t trust the media.
While the Gallup release did not describe specific reasons for the decline, corporate media outlets have been criticized for their handling of multiple stories in recent years.
Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades. pic.twitter.com/P8T6nzowbi
— Gallup (@Gallup) February 27, 2025
A Wall Street Journal article published Dec. 19 revealed White House aides allegedly “insulated” Biden, even from Cabinet members, as his health declined, months after similar articles published by the outlet earlier in the year generated pushback from some media figures.
During a June 5, 2024, episode of “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough and fellow panelists on the MSNBC show attacked the Watt Street Journal over a separate story featuring dozens of observations from Republicans and Democrats about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness.
“This does have the feeling of Trump acolytes laundering their attacks through a prestigious news organization in the Wall Street Journal,” panelist Willie Geist said during the episode.
Prominent CNN host Jake Tapper also had multiple guests on his show to criticize the notion Biden was suffering from “cognitive decline” before co-authoring a book with Axios reporter Alex Thompson on how Biden’s decline was reportedly covered up. Tapper was also found liable for defamation in a case involving a Navy veteran.
Politico published an October 2020 letter that claimed a bombshell New York Post report about emails from a laptop supposedly abandoned by Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The Daily Caller News Foundation later confirmed the authenticity of some of the contents on the laptop that month.
MSNBC hosts and guests also routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and repeatedly had then-Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air. The Steele Dossier, which was used to further the allegations of collusion, was later discredited.
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