In an information environment characterized by deep tensions between President Donald Trump and national news organizations, Americans are more divided than ever in their trust of the news media.
A new Pew Research Center exploration of more than 50 of the Center’s surveys, combined with an analysis of more than 100 survey questions measuring possible factors that could drive trust in the news media, confirms this.
In the Trump era, no factor comes close to matching the impact of political party identification.
On item after item, Republicans consistently express far greater skepticism of the news media and their motives than Democrats, analyses that focuses on trust in the news media during 2018 and 2019 reveal.
Further, the analysis reveals that divides emerge within party – particularly the Republican Party – based on how strongly people approve of Trump’s performance as president. Trump has publicly and repeatedly criticized both news organizations and the journalists who work for them, criticisms that, according to this study, resonate with his most fervent supporters.
For example, the link between the public’s approval of Trump and views of the news media is clear in evaluations of journalists’ ethics, Pew finds. About three-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (31%) say journalists have very low ethical standards, roughly six times the 5% of Democrats and Democratic leaners who say this.
Trump’s strongest approvers, though, express even greater suspicion: 40% of Republicans who strongly approve of Trump’s job performance say journalists’ ethical standards are very low. That is true of far fewer Republicans who only somewhat approve of Trump or disapprove of him: 17% and 12%, respectively. Overall, this relationship between support for Trump and depressed trust in the news media persists over a range of attitudes.
Among the other key findings from this exploration of multiple surveys:
| • | The extent to which a person is engaged with national politics and the news surrounding it also plays into their evaluation of the news media. Highly engaged partisans are even more polarized in their views than the two parties overall. For example, there is a 46 percentage point gap between all Democrats and Republicans in whether they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence that journalists will act in the best interests of the public. This jumps to a 75-point gap between the highly politically aware Democrats and Republicans (91% of highly politically aware Democrats vs. 16% of highly aware Republicans). |
| • | While there are profound political divides in Americans’ views of the news media and journalists generally, partisanship is less connected to the public’s sense of loyalty to their own individually preferred sources of information – that is, those sources they tend to rely on most. Instead of stark divides, the most fervent partisans – Trump’s strongest approvers and detractors, as well as those who are highly engaged with politics or with the news – are much more on par in their sense of loyalty and tend to be more loyal than their less fervent counterparts. |
| • | While no other factors in this study come close to partisan dynamics in their relationship to Americans’ views of the news media, a few factors show some connection. Americans who express greater trust in others (interpersonal trust) tend to give the news media higher marks than those who are less trusting. Additionally, there are some interesting dfferences across demographic groups, such as those based on age, race and ethnicity, religion, and education. For example, black Americans often exhibit greater support of news organizations and journalists than Hispanic or white Americans. And older adults are more loyal to their preferred news sources than younger adults. Other concepts such as life cycle milestones and life satisfaction measures show limited, inconsistent or no relationship with evaluations of the news media. |
The goal of the Pew study was to integrate a wide range of concepts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the factors that link to the public’s trust in the news media today.
Researchers pulled together years of Pew Research Center surveys conducted on the Center’s American Trends Panel and examined responses from the panel members across these surveys. Using advanced statistical weighting and multivariate analyses, attitudes toward the news media – including direct measures of trust as well as closely related measures – were set alongside a wide range of other measures to examine what connects to trust in the news media.
Read the report: https://www.journalism.org/
