Five Key Insights Into Americans' Views of the News Media

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When Gallup began tracking Americans’ views of the news media in the early 1970s, attitudes were overwhelmingly positive, but public confidence in the Fourth Estate has collapsed over the past three decades. President Donald Trump’s press secretary recently cited these data as a reason behind the administration’s decision to reserve a seat at White House press briefings for nontraditional “new media,” such as “podcasts, blogs, social media and other independent outlets.”

In light of this latest attention given to Americans’ views of the news media, here are five notable findings about the media landscape in the U.S. today from Gallup polling:

1. Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades.

About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly.” By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53%, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003. Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.

2. Republicans' lack of trust in the mass media has surged in the Trump era.

Whereas about a third of U.S. adults say they have no trust at all in the mass media, 59% of Republicans hold this view -- a view that saw a particularly sharp increase between 2015 and 2017, when it rose 21 percentage points to 48%. Republicans’ lack of trust in the media topped 50% for the first time in 2020 and has since remained at the majority level. Lack of trust is also up sharply among independents, now 42%, while it continues to be low -- 6% this year -- among Democrats.

Another 29% of Republicans, 32% of independents and 40% of Democrats in 2024 reported having “not much” trust in the news media, resulting in the vast majority of Republicans (88%) and independents (74%) and nearly half of Democrats (46%) having low trust in the media. Conversely, 12% of Republicans, 27% of independents and 54% of Democrats trust it “a great deal” or “a fair amount.”

3. Generational patterns don’t bode well for media trust in the future.

Over the past two decades, significant gaps in trust have also emerged by age. People younger than 50 are much less trusting in the news media than people aged 50 and older, particularly the oldest Americans (those aged 65 and older). An analysis of combined 2022-2024 data to increase sample sizes shows a 17-point gap in trust between the oldest Americans (those aged 65 and older) and those under age 50 -- 43% vs. 26%, respectively.

Over the past 24 years, Democrats of all ages have generally expressed more trust in the mass media than Republicans of all ages, particularly in recent years. However, two trends among Democrats suggest that trust in the media could decrease further in the future, unless Republican trust rebounds.

• Democrats’ trust in the mass media has been lower in the past three years among all Democratic age groups than it was for those same groups between 2019 and 2021.
• As Democrats’ trust has fallen over the past three years, it has dropped more among younger than older Democrats. As a result, the Democratic age gap is now its widest, with less than a third of 18- to 29-year-old Democrats expressing a great deal or fair amount of trust versus 75% of Democrats aged 65+.

4. Confidence in news has fallen more than confidence in other institutions.

Gallup annually measures confidence in a variety of U.S. public institutions, and in 2024, as in recent years, news media institutions -- specifically, newspaper and television news -- ranked at the bottom, just above Congress.

While confidence in most of these institutions has fallen in the past 30 years, it has declined more for the two news media institutions than for the three government institutions (Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court) and the nine other institutions measured consistently since 1993.

The three types of institutions had similar ratings in 1993. The news media has not reached that level again, but the other institutions generally saw improvement in the late 1990s and early 2000s because of the dot-com economic boom and the rally effect after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. After peaking in 2002 or 2004, confidence in these institutions also began to decline.

5. Print news professions are rated slightly better than their television counterparts.

Gallup’s annual measurement of the perceived honesty and ethics of people in various professions finds a steep decline in Americans' trust in news professionals' honesty and ethics, with television reporters experiencing a sharper drop than newspaper reporters and journalists.

In 1981, 36% of Americans said television reporters had very high or high honesty and ethical standards, but by 2024, that figure had plummeted to just 13%, marking a historical low.

Newspaper reporters and journalists have followed a similar trajectory. But these professions had lower honesty and ethics ratings than television reporters in the early 1980s, and their most recent ratings -- 17% in 2024 for newspaper reporters and 19% in 2023 for journalists -- are slightly higher than for television reporters.

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