Trump more trusted than US media – poll
More Americans are inclined to trust US President Donald Trump than the country’s political media, which the majority believes is “out of touch” with everyday people, a poll by Morning Consult revealed.
Over a third – 37 percent – of US citizens said they thought that the Trump administration was telling them the truth, while only 29 percent of respondents trusted the US political media to be honest with them, Morning Consult said on Friday.
According to the poll, just over half of the respondents – 51 percent – said that the country’s media “is out of touch with everyday Americans.”
The number of those who believe that the press “understand the issues everyday Americans are facing” was 29 percent.
Just over half of those polled – 52 percent – confessed to having not much or no trust at all in the coverage of Trump by the media.
Forty-eight percent of respondents also thought that the American press has been treating the current president tougher than his White House predecessors.
The mistrust towards the media was much higher among Republican Party supports than the Democrats, Morning Consult said.
Over two-thirds – 72 percent – of Republicans confirmed their trust in the White House, while 54 percent of Democrats called the media trustworthy, the poll revealed.
The independents were also unimpressed with the media, with more than half calling the reporting on the White House unfair and having more trust in the White House than in the press.
Trump’s claims that media coverage of him manly consists of “fake news” are also shared by the majority of Americans, according to the poll.
Forty-two percent of those participating in the Morning Consult survey claimed they saw “fake news” in the papers and on TV on a daily basis, while 31 percent said it happened once every few days.
2,006 adults participated in the online nation-wide survey, which was conducted by the Morning Consult on April 25-26 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Trump’s war with the mainly Democratic US media began during his presidential campaign and has intensified since he took office on January 20.
Shortly after the inauguration, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon said that the media were “the opposition party” which should “keep its mouth shut.”
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Trump banned CNN, the BBC, the New York Times and other outlets from his media events for their supposedly biased coverage.
“I have never seen more dishonest media, frankly, than the political media,” Trump said during a press conference in February. “The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”
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In March, a survey by the Media Research Center (MRC) revealed that the coverage of Trump during his first month in office was negative nearly 90 percent of the time.
