Media Confidence and the Pollsters

Confidence in the media is abysmally low, a finding confirmed regularly by many pollsters asking many different questions. This is hardly news, but it has significant implications not only for the media itself but also for the media’s polling partners. Gallup’s recent updates to their substantial trends on the media reveal the depths of the problem.

Gallup has been measuring confidence in newspapers since 1973, when 39% expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. In their poll this July, that response was 17%. Gallup added television news in 1993, when 46% had a high confidence. Now, this figure has dropped to 11%. There are partisan differences, but confidence in the media is low across the board: in 2025, 12% of Republicans expressed high confidence in newspapers while 24% of Democrats did. As for television, 11% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats expressed strong confidence. Hardly votes of confidence.

Gallup looked at the honesty and ethical standards of different professions in late 2024, and majorities gave the low or very low response to three of the 23 the surveyors examined. These were TV reporters (55% said they had low or very low standards), members of Congress (68%), and lobbyists (68%). Newspaper reporters fared only slightly better. Forty-five percent said their standards were low or very low.

Response to a broader Gallup question on trust and confidence in the mass media “such as newspapers, TV, and radio – when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly” has fallen significantly since they asked this question in 1997. In their 2024 reading, 31% overall had a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence, but more, 36%, had no trust at all. Gallup notes that this is the third year in a row in which more people had no trust than had a great deal or fair amount of it. Gallup has been asking this question regularly since 1997, and the no confidence response has risen sharply. A Pew 2025 survey that provides trend data back to 2016 shows more stability in “information” provided by the national news media, but only 17% had a lot of confidence in it in 2025, and 50% some. For social media sites, those figures were 7% a lot and 35% some.

Analyses of the decline in trust in the media today are numerous. A Pew Charitable Trust analysis focused on polarization and economic disruption in the industry. There are also concerns about bias, a new cohort of progressive journalists who are part of an out-of-touch media elite, relentlessly negative coverage, and incessant scandal and celebrity stories. I’ll leave the diagnosis to the experts, but I do often wonder what happened to the old journalism maxim of telling readers the who, what, where of news events.

The pollsters feed the journalistic maw with breathless findings on Trump’s up and downs, on scandal, etc. Don’t get me wrong. I want to know how Donald Trump and the political parties are faring, and I’m even mildly interested in polling about the 2026 elections, even though they are over a year away and a lot can change. Polling will always be a valuable way to take the public’s temperature, but something seems to be missing as modern pollsters have tied themselves so closely to the old and new media. To this long-time observer, it feels as if the pollsters once had more involvement in setting the agenda for each poll than they do today. Despite the explosion of polling, there seems to be less interest in trends or how Americans live their lives. Political coverage, and especially celebrity and scandal stories, are central to the news media and the pollsters now, as if these were the main or only topics that interest Americans.

Pollsters have had media partners for decades. They help them get their findings out and burnish their reputations. George Gallup relied on newspapers to publicize his polls. Elmo Roper polled for Fortune magazine, starting in the mid-1930s. Media-polling partnerships flowered starting in the mid-1970s with the CBS News/New York Times poll which began in late1975. ABC and the Washington Post started partnering in 1981 and NBC and the Wall Street Journal followed suit in 1985. Today pollsters change partners often as they navigate the new media environment.

There is no indication of an impending divorce or even a trial separation between the pollsters and the media, but the pollsters have tied themselves to a widely unpopular institution and that’s a problem.