Poll reveals how many Americans think media pushes own agenda over facts
More than three quarters of all Americans from across the political spectrum think the news media’s primary goal is “advancing their own opinions or political agendas,” according to a new poll.
A Trafalgar Group poll published this month found that 76.3% of Americans agree that the primary focus of the mainstream media is “advancing their own opinions or political agendas,” with 23.7% saying the media’s focus is “finding and reporting the facts.”
Republicans were the most cynical group surveyed, with more than 90% believing that the media pushes its own political agenda. 76% of independents felt the same.
Democrats were the most trustful of the media, but only just, with 37.3% trusting news outlets to deliver the facts and with 62.7% accusing them of pushing partisanship.
"Thanks to the decentralization of the news through the internet and social media, the mainstream press outlets no longer have a monopoly on controlling the news,” Convention of States Action President Mark Meckler said in a statement to the Daily Caller, a conservative news site.
"Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been slow to adjust to this reality and don’t seem to realize that the average American can now see in real time the difference between the actual facts of a story versus what the mainstream media says.”
The hyper-partisanship of the Trump administration - which saw the president treated to scathing coverage by liberal outlets and adulation by the comparatively fewer conservative ones - has not done the media any favors in terms of public trust. A poll by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism this summer found that out of 46 countries surveyed, the US ranked last in media trust.
Another Gallup poll in October found that only 36% of the American public expressed “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the news media, the lowest figure since 2016 and nearly 20 points lower than at the turn of the millennium.
