Gallup Reports Trust in Media at All-Time Low

Journalists have taken fire from candidates and their surrogates this year as the election approaches, and some of that criticism seems to have stuck, reports Gallup.

In Gallup’s annual poll measuring Americans’ trust in mass media, just 32 percent of those surveyed said they had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media, down eight percentage points from 2015. Fourteen percent of Republicans surveyed expressed trust, down from 32 percent in 2016.

Trust in mass media was at its highest, 72 percent, in 1976, reports Gallup, two years after Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate disclosures. It has fallen steadily since the early 2000s and dipped below a majority level after 2007.

“The drop in overall trust this year was caused in part by a conspicuous decline among Republican respondents, who reported a lack in confidence as pundits and politicians accused reporters of giving Hillary Clinton preferential treatment,” according to Gallup.