Credibility Crisis: Gallup Finds 60 Percent Have Little or No Trust in Media
As the media report on the allegedly horrid polls for Mitt Romney, will they take the time to report the latest on their own poll ratings with Gallup? “Americans' distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60 percent saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.” Here’s the ugly breakdown on trust:
Only 26 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of independents have a
“great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media. Naturally,
considering the tilt of their reporting, 58 percent of Democrats have a
“great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media. This might
explain why these "objective" media prefer to oversample Democrats in
their polls.
"Distrust is especially up from the past few years, when Americans were
already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior
to 2004," Gallup said. It was up five points from 55 percent in 2011. This ought to be perceived as punishment for the
media’s ridiculous over-selling of Barack Obama’s promise in 2008. As
Gallup added:
The record distrust in the media, based on a survey conducted Sept. 6-9, 2012, also means that negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year. This reflects the continuation of a pattern in which negativity increases every election year compared with the year prior. The current gap between negative and positive views -- 20 percentage points -- is by far the highest Gallup has recorded since it began regularly asking the question in the 1990s. Trust in the media was much higher, and more positive than negative, in the years prior to 2004 -- as high as 72% when Gallup asked this question three times in the 1970s.
Will
anyone in the “mainstream” media actually see these polling numbers as a
crisis? Or will they continue to dismiss these numbers, lamenting that
viewers not only pick the media that supports their views?
That would be wrong, if you track this Gallup poll. “Despite their record-low trust in media, Republicans are the partisan group most likely to be paying close attention to news about national politics, with the 48% who are doing so similar to the 50% in 2008 and up significantly from 38% in 2004.”
Gallup concludes that the door may be opening for citizens to abandon the Old Media:
On a broad level, Americans' high level of distrust in the media poses a challenge to democracy and to creating a fully engaged citizenry. Media sources must clearly do more to earn the trust of Americans, the majority of whom see the media as biased one way or the other. At the same time, there is an opportunity for others outside the "mass media" to serve as information sources that Americans do trust.
For much more on how the public assesses the media, check out the MRC’s “Media Bias 101: What Journalists Really Think -- and What the Public Thinks About the Media.”
It features a rundown of “Gallup Polls on Media Bias” within the “How the Public Views the Media” section.
