This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
“Disinformation” has been a big player in the media in recent years.
There was that “disinformation” about the Biden family’s international business deals, that really wasn’t disinformation, but it likely changed the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Then there was Joe Biden’s attempt to set up a government board that would regulate “disinformation.”
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And there have been all of those social media company attacks on “disinformation” that always seems to go one political direction.
The result?
According to Gallup, nearly 4 in 10 Americans (38%) have “no trust” in America’s media, including newspapers, TV, and radio.
The political divide is stark. Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents trust the media, but 70% of Democrats, whose agenda largely has been adopted by reporters and publishers, trust the media.
Overall, 34% of respondents trust the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”
But “Just 7% of Americans have a great deal of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have a fair amount,'” the poll said. At the other end of the scale, 28% say they do not have very much confidence and 38% say they have “none at all.”
“Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined,” Gallup reported.
Gallup reported it’s the third straight year that a majority, 57%, of Republicans have “no trust at all,” and at 27%, independents’ confidence is lower than it ever has been before. Fully 41% of independents have “no trust at all.”
Gallup reported, “Americans’ confidence in the media has been anemic for nearly two decades, and Gallup’s latest findings further document that distrust. The current level of public trust in the media’s full, fair and accurate reporting of the news is the second lowest on record. This new confidence reading follows Gallup’s historically low confidence in both TV news and newspapers in June and a new low in December’s annual rating of the honesty and ethics of television reporters. Newspaper reporters received similarly low ratings in the same poll.”
In his Washington Examiner column, Paul Bedard wrote, “Multiple studies over the last few years have shown that more viewers are turning to social media outlets for their news, but in many, they admit that they don’t trust those sources either.”
