By CatholicVote | Created at 2025-03-06 00:16:04 | Updated at 2025-03-06 13:23:59
13 hours ago
CV NEWS FEED // Americans’ trust in the news and mass media reached its lowest point in more than five decades in 2024, a change largely driven by Republicans, according to data from Gallup.
CatholicVote reported in October that Americans’ trust in the mass media hit a record low of just 31% last year, down significantly from the 68% recorded in 1972, when Gallup first began asking the question. In 2024, 33% said they didn’t trust the media very much, and 36% said they had no trust in the media at all, Gallup reported.
However, Gallup noted that there is a strong partisan divide between those who say they trust the media and those who do not. In 2024, 59% of Republicans said they didn’t trust the media, compared to 6% of Democrats who said the same thing. Independents fell in the middle, with 42% also expressing a lack of trust. The percentage of Republicans with no trust in the media also spiked dramatically between 2015 and 2017, going from 27% to 48%.
Gallup found that trust in the media also differs by age demographic, with people over 50 being more trusting of the news. Younger generations are less likely to trust the media, and younger Democrats are also less likely than their older counterparts to have faith in the media, a trend across the past three years.
“[T]he 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+,” Gallup reported.
Gallup also found that Americans’ confidence in the news and media has fallen more than trust in almost any other U.S. public institution. A June 2024 poll discovered that trust in newspapers and television news ranked at just 18% and 12%, respectively, below every other U.S. public institution except Congress, which received only 9% confidence.
Finally, Gallup discovered that Americans trust print newspapers, reporters, and journalists more than they trust television reporters, but the confidence rating remains low for all four. In 2024, just 13% said that television reporters had “very high or high honesty ethical standards,” while 17% said the same for newspaper reporters.
