Distrust in mainstream media nears all time high

Sunday, October 03, 2010 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: distrust, mainstream media, health news

(NaturalNews) A recent Gallup poll has found that 57 percent of Americans have little or no trust in the mainstream media to report full, accurate and fair news. This level of distrust in the media is the highest it has been since at least 1973, topped only by recent record-low trust levels in the legislative branch of the U.S. government.

The findings confirm earlier ones from back in August that revealed an astounding 78 percent of Americans have little or no confidence in television news. And print news hardly fares any better, with a mere 25 percent of Americans having any significant level of confidence in its honesty and integrity. Both statistics are among the lowest they have ever been for such categories.

The most recent poll found that nearly half of Americans think the media is too "liberal", while 15 percent think it is too "conservative". And even in spite of the growth of internet and cable news over the past couple decades, such statistics remain roughly the same.

According to the survey, Democrats and "liberals" are much more likely than Republicans and "conservatives" to trust the media at all. And like Republicans and "conservatives", Independents have little or no trust in the media either. However, 63 percent of people overall believe the news media is biased in either one direction or the other.

Among all the categories, adults aged 18 to 29 lost the most trust in the mainstream media over the past several years, as did people who make $75,000 or more a year and those who graduated from college. On the other hand, less educated people with lower incomes tend to be the most trusting of the mainstream media, the survey found.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/143267/Distrust-M...

http://www.gallup.com/poll/143225/Trust-Legi...

http://www.gallup.com/poll/142133/Confidence...