Polling wasn’t the only clue before Tuesday’s election that the spell President Donald Trump cast over America was fading.
Another sign was that people are trusting the press again.
Surveys in late summer found trust in news media rebounding, even among Republicans who fell for the “fake news” malarkey that Trump peddled for a decade.
I’m not saying that’s why Democrats swept the midterms. That happened for many reasons that will be hashed out for months. My contribution is to suggest we may be emerging from a dark period when trust in the press and other institutions was diminished.
Rising trust should help voters make more informed choices. Researchers studying why voters switched sides should ask how news coverage influenced their decisions.
This may be premature enthusiasm. But I’m hoping trust keeps growing and leads to not only more balanced government, but also a stronger news industry, more accountability journalism and increased civic literacy.
Especially promising were September surveys by Pew Research Center, published last week, that found 62% of U.S. adults now have some or a lot of trust in national news outlets. A year ago that fell to 56%, the lowest point in a decade of Pew surveys on the topic.
Local outlets are even more trusted, with 75% of adults trusting them in September, up from 70% a year ago.
The shift among Republicans stands out. Their trust in national outlets hit a low, with just 35% believing the nation’s largest news organizations, in June 2021. That was when Congress began investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump and his allies were furiously trying to undermine institutions that bring accountability.
Their reality distortion field could only hold so long.
A growing share of Republicans came to realize that Trump was wrong, journalists weren’t “enemies of the people” and the press wasn’t lying about corruption, mismanagement, broken promises or ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
By September, half of Republicans were back to trusting national media and 69% trusted local news organizations, Pew found.
This turnaround also surfaced in Gallup polling. Its media survey is imprecise, asking about trust in “mass media,” but still captured the trend.
A year ago Gallup found Republicans’ confidence in the media reached a record low of 8%. That coincided with Trump expanding his attacks on the press, suing publishers and barring outlets whose coverage he disliked.
Even if voters didn’t follow or care about the press attacks, they experienced rising food and fuel costs because of tariffs and a Middle East war initiated by Trump. People turn to news outlets during crises and periods of uncertainty and the administration delivered both over the last year.
In September, Gallup found the share of Republicans’ trusting the media had more than doubled, to 22%.
Overall, Gallup found 33% of Americans trusted the mass media in September, up from 28% a year ago.
Of course that’s still too low. News outlets must do more to further build trust, especially among conservatives. I suggest more watchdog reporting. Americans’ perception of government corruption is at a record high, with 89% of adults saying it’s widespread, per Gallup polling.
Another survey released last week found that 77% of Republicans believe “most journalists try to manipulate the news for political or commercial purposes.” Overall, only 37% of adults believe most journalists try to report the news as accurately as possible, according to the poll by NORC at the University of Chicago with the Alliance for Trust in Media and the Medill Local News Initiative.
It’s good to be a critical news consumer but I wonder where those respondents are getting news. If it’s mostly from social media and cable TV, they may be correctly identifying commercial and political motivations.
The NORC survey also found that local news is U.S. adults’ most trusted source of news, with 64% saying they trust local outlets “some,” “quite a bit” or “a great deal.” Friends and family were the next most trusted source (59%) followed by national newspapers (56%) and network television (54%).
The Alliance, founded by New Jersey news industry veteran Eric Schurenberg, teaches media literacy skills and works with newsrooms on strategies to build trust with their audiences.
Schurenberg told me about a promising experiment with the Texas Tribune. They gave one group of “rural, presumably conservative Texans” a tool to send messages and questions directly to newsroom leaders. A control group had no such tool. Both were later surveyed about their opinions of the news outlet.
“They were far less likely to claim, after having had this access to the newsroom, that journalists make stuff up at the Texas Tribune, or that they color their reporting with political bias, or that they don’t fact-check, things that the control group of rural Texans believed largely to be true,” he said.
That proved the benefit of transparency.
“When people can see professionals actually trying to get things right and being open to input and things like that,” he said, “the scales fall from their eyes.”
As for the rebound in trust identified by Pew, Schurenberg said it may partly reflect improvements in the news industry. Journalists have “become a little bit more sensitive to our own behavior that allows people to draw sort of negative conclusions about what we’re doing.”
He believes pre-election coverage by “iconic, liberal, mainstream media” was more measured, noting that polls favorable to Democrats could prove wrong, for instance.
Schurenberg was measured himself when I suggested trust in the press is rebounding because people finally realize Trump is jerking their chain.
“I have no particular insight there,” he said, “but if the source of the mistrust is a mistaken notion of how the news gets made, and why it gets made the way it does, and then you have continued evidence of the person who’s instrumental in spreading that rumor being not a very reliable source himself, I think that only helps.”
Fingers crossed the trend continues.
