Overwhelming majorities of Americans have lost their trust in the media to accurately report the news, according to a new poll out Wednesday.
In a survey from the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a whopping 83 percent of respondents said they were concerned the media would “report inaccurate information or disinformation” in their 2024 election coverage.
Eighty-one percent said they are worried the media will report unverified information, and 77 percent said they feared the media would stick to the facts — but be dishonest in their framing, only covering things favorable to their preferred candidates or detrimental to their opponents.
Pollsters found that 72 percent are worried media will rely on artificial intelligence to generate stories.
The survey results corroborate the findings of another poll released by Gallup last fall, which revealed American trust in the media at a new low. According to Gallup, 39 percent of Americans rated their level of confidence in mass media at “none at all,” marking an all-time high since 1972 when the pollster first asked the question. Twenty-nine percent said they had “not very much trust” in media, and only about 3 in 10 reported any confidence.
Trust in the media peaked in the 1970s and has suffered a rapid decline since 2018 when, in the middle of the Trump administration, the corporate press executed a character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee. The federal judge was smeared as a gang rapist while President Trump was accused of serving as an undercover Kremlin agent in the White House.
During the 2020 presidential election, the corporate media dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop and its blockbuster revelations about Democrat Joe Biden’s intimate involvement in his son’s overseas business ventures. National Public Radio wrote off the scandal as a “waste” of “time,” while other outlets such as Politico published allegations from former intelligence officials, who tried to discredit the laptop as Russian disinformation. Politico waited until nearly a year after the election to verify the infamous laptop as authentic.
As the AP-NORC poll out Thursday and many other polls show, this type of perpetual dishonesty from the media has demolished voters’ confidence. The new survey of 2,468 adults was conducted March 21-25 with a +/-2.9 percent margin of error.
