Distrust of U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High
September 29th, 2010For the fourth straight year, a majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. The 57 percent who now say that is a record high, according to Gallup’s annual Governance poll.
The 43 percent of Americans who express a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media ties the record low, and is far worse than three prior Gallup readings on this measure from the 1970s.
Trust in the media is now slightly higher than the record-low trust in the legislative branch but lower than trust in the executive and judicial branches of government, even though trust in all three branches is down sharply this year. These findings also further confirm a separate Gallup poll that found little confidence in newspapers and television specifically.
Overall, perceptions of bias have remained quite steady over this tumultuous period of change for the media, marked by the growth of cable and Internet news sources.
Nearly half of Americans, 48 percent, say the media are too liberal, tying the high end of the narrow 44 percent to 48 percent range recorded over the past decade. One-third say the media are just about right while 15 percent say they are too conservative.
Lower-income Americans and those with less education are generally more likely to trust the media than are those with higher incomes and more education. A subgroup analysis of these data suggests that three demographic groups key to advertisers — adults aged 18 to 29, Americans making at least $75,000 per year, and college graduates — lost more trust in the media in the past year than other groups.
Bottom Line
Gallup’s annual update on trust in the mass media finds Americans’ views entrenched — with a record-high 57 percent expressing little to no trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly, and 63 percent perceiving bias in one direction or the other. At the same time, the steady nature of these views stands in contrast to Americans’ views of the three branches of government, which are all down sharply this year.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 13-16, with a random sample of 1,019 adults, aged 18 and older, living in the continental U.S., selected using random-digit-dial sampling. The question on whether the media are too liberal, too conservative or just about right is part of a USA Today/Gallup poll series. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
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Tags: Bias, Distrust of U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High, Gallup Poll
September 30th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Distrust of the media is nothing new in American history, of course. But maybe it’s tied into distrust of other large institutional actors in our national life today.
The Tea Party movement, for all its rhetoric about small government and individual liberty, at its core is an expression of profound distrust in large institutions. The government is the target of convenience since, as the largest institution in the country, and the only one with a monopoly on pre-emptive coercion, it affects the most people. I suspect, strongly, that if folks ideologically compatible with Tea partiers were in charge, the TP distrust would shift somewhere else.
Liberals and progressives tend to distrust large corporations, but find nothing especially troubling about large organizations, such as unions and a variety of special interest groups, that reflect their ideology. Ironically, they share the rightwing distrust of the media, although they would, as the data indicates, condemn it for being too conservative.
Distrust of large organizations is genetic in our national history, starting with our distrust of the British Empire and revolution against it. For more than a century and a half after that, until FDR, the US government was relatively small. Distrust of monopolies set up by the robber barons in the late 19th century led to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break them up. Distrust of centralized banking led to the demise of the Bank of the US under Andrew Jackson; the system was not renewed until 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve.
During the heydey of the Pulitzer and Heart newspaper empires, many Americans (are any polls from those days available; did they do any) probably distrusted the big city dailies they controlled, at least out in the hinterland.
Most people, if not everyone, senses that today, in an exceptionally partisan and self-focused America, it’s hard to trust anyone or anything about which one has no personal knowledge. Even the latter come under suspicion regularly.
Why? The agenda factor, meaning that every organization has its own agenda — topping the list is self-preservation. This focus can be self-defeating, however. Freedom of the press, and more recent media, is predicated on the notion that it serves the purpose of liberty and democratic governance. Today the mainstream media are focused mostly on self-preservation, not on this critical mission, and likely this polling data reflects the instinctive understanding of that on the part of many, perhaps most Americans.
All of that making the webpress, like Locust Fork, especially critical in this period of history.
October 1st, 2010 at 8:56 am
LIke just about everything in American life, it is all about the money.
That’s what run amok corporate capitalism does to a society.
The tea baggers had no problem with Bush’s wars and deficits. It is the black Democrat who they hate. From beginning to end, it is a fake movement of the Republican right.
Tea & Crackers
How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0