This Gallup poll is nothing but bad news for the media. While institutional trust is in a state of mass collapse, the media’s collapse is truly catastrophic.
In 2021, 13% of independents had a great deal of confidence in television news compared to 6% of Republicans. It’s now at 8% for both.
What that means is that independents have about as much confidence in TV news as Republicans do.
The picture for newspapers is better, slightly better.
Among independents, newspapers fell from 19% to 12%.
The numbers are obviously bad among Republicans, at 5%, but even among Democrats, there was a slight decline down to 35% for newspapers and from 26% to 20% for TV news.
None of this is good news, pun repetition not intended, for a media that is in theory out to influence the public.
It also helps explain the political collapse of the Biden administration among independents. They’ve simply tuned out the media and its narratives.
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