Gallup: America No Longer Trusts the Media

You might have had a “duh” moment when you read the headline, but it’s human nature to believe that everyone thinks the way you and your associates do. But that comes crashing down when you look at President Obama’s approval ratings and realize that nearly 60% of Americans think he’s doing a bang-up job in the White House. Do you know anyone personally who likes Barack Obama? Sometimes it’s astounding to realize how vastly different others view the issues facing the country.

In this case, though, it appears that more and more Americans are catching on to the country’s biggest scam: The honesty – or lack thereof – in the mainstream media. A new Gallup poll shows that trust in the nation’s major news sources has eroded to its lowest point since 1972, when the pollsters first surveyed the country on this topic.

In 1976, trust in the media reached an all-time high, according to Gallup. Thirty years ago, 72% thought the media reported the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”

The major networks and newspapers would love to see those numbers return in 2016. Unfortunately, they’re nowhere close. Today, only 32% of Americans think the news media is being straightforward with the public. That number shrinks even more when limited to Republicans: Only 14% think the media is being honest. That figure alone is astonishing; 32% of Republicans expressed trust in the media at this time last year.

Democrats, unsurprisingly, still think the media’s doing a pretty good job. Gallup reports that 51% of Democrats continue to put their faith in the mass media. Of course, why would they think otherwise. NBC, CBS, ABC, and the major cable news channels give viewers a non-stop diet of liberal nonsense; if you went by coverage alone, you would think that Obama was the greatest president of all time. They haven’t been quite so friendly to Hillary Clinton, but any criticism thrown at her has been drowned out by the endless landslide of negative Donald Trump coverage. And, considering the serious problems with Clinton as a candidate, they’ve been pretty damn soft on her.

But, as Gallup points out, this trend towards unethical bias didn’t start with the 2016 election cycle. The major networks and newspapers have been slowly but surely lifting the veil on their liberal tendencies for years now, driven to even greater extremes by the success of Fox News. They now blame their dwindling ratings and subscription rates on the rise of the internet. That’s part of it, no doubt, but is it the biggest part of the problem? These media titans will never examine themselves closely enough to find out.