On Fox News recently, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany talked about the latest Gallup poll that found distrust in media has hit yet another record low and she offered her take on the reasons why.
Showing three pairs of contradictory headlines from years past — including one from The Washington Post that said “it’s doubtful” that COVID-19 emerged from a lab and another, a year later, that called the theory “credible” — McEnany said that “false narratives” presented as news are responsible for low trust.
Others have a sharply different take and assign blame to McEnany’s former boss, President Donald Trump, who popularized the term “fake news.”
There’s also the deliberate spread of misinformation on social media, and the sheer number of news outlets offering counterpoints to the legacy media’s takes. Research by Rutgers University researcher Katherine Ognyanova found, “The increasing use of alternative sources is associated with a tendency to question mainstream news and doubt political authority.”
And the decline in media trust is also occurring in tandem with an erosion of trust in institutions at large.
But there are a couple of caveats. Individual personalities are often trusted more than the news organizations they represent. And there’s one group of Americans in particular that is driving the record-low numbers of trust.
Polling released last month by The Hollywood Reporter/Morning Consult, for example, showed that 60% of respondents said they had a lot or some trust in Anderson Cooper of CNN.
CNN fared poorly, however, in a YouGov poll released in May that measured trust in 52 media organizations. (CNN ranked 24th in that poll, behind The Guardian, Newsweek and Yahoo News.)
While these are three different polls, they each offer a window into how Americans’ consumption of media is evolving in a time of rapid change.
But Gallup’s latest poll shows that if trust in media is to rebound, it has to start with one group in particular: Republicans.
Who distrusts the media the most?
According to Gallup, “Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.”
Overall, that means that 7 out of 10 Americans have “not very much” confidence in the media or “none at all.”
But a more granular look at the polling shows the numbers skewed by Republicans, whose trust in the media has fallen to single digits for the first time since Gallup started asking the question in the 1970s. Just 8% of Republicans had confidence in media, compared to 27% of independents and 51% of Democrats.
Moreover, there is a generational divide. Per Gallup, “In the most recent three-year period, spanning 2023 to 2025, 43% of adults aged 65 and older trust the media, compared with no more than 28% in any younger age group.”
Baby Boomers and older Democrats, in other words, are keeping media distrust from falling even lower than it is.
“With confidence fractured along partisan and generational lines, the challenge for news organizations is not only to deliver fair and accurate reporting but also to regain credibility across an increasingly polarized and skeptical public,” Gallup said in its report.
Some news organizations, while grappling with the loss of young Americans who are getting news from social media platforms like TikTok, are looking for ways to win back the trust — and dollars — of conservatives.
Paramount Skydance recently made headlines with its acquisition of The Free Press and the appointment of Bari Weiss to be president of CBS News. And some news outlets are reporting that Weiss wants to bring Fox News anchor Bret Baier to CBS (which would be difficult, since Baier is under contract until the end of 2028).
Meanwhile, CNN may soon be undergoing significant changes, too. Per The Washington Post, “Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN and HBO, announced that it’s open to a sale, leaving its news and streaming subsidiaries’ futures uncertain.”
One person expected to make a bid is David Ellison, the Paramount Skydance CEO responsible for the recent changes at CBS.
“An acquisition would place CNN and CBS, two legacy news brands, under the same roof,” according to The Washington Post.