The Relationship Between Media Confidence and News Avoidance
The term “doom scrolling” entered common speech in 2020 when several different overlapping news cycles created a high amount of public reaction, anxiety, and stress. The pandemic, the George Floyd murder, police protests and public backlash, toxic politics, and an attempted coup-d’etat all colored the year irrevocably in the minds of much of the public. Customers found themselves forced to sort through an overwhelming amount of digital media and misrepresentation of facts over social media in their efforts to find accurate news.
This appears to be having consequences: media confidence in the United States is now at a record low. Just 16 percent of Americans say they “have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers,” and 11 percent admitted to having “some” confidence. Along party lines, registered Democrats were more likely to say they trusted news sources than Independents and Republicans, but overall confidence is very low across party lines. The only institution in the United States that has less public confidence than TV news is Congress, with only an 8 percent confidence rating.
The confusion and subsequent fight over COVID-19 vaccines also saw several news sources using misinformation or highlighting false correlations between the vaccines and negative symptoms, causing several scientists to call out the media over their reporting practices. Other media sources calling out the problems with reporting around COVID-19 vaccines also appear to have exacerbated the problem: in October of last year, American trust in the media dropped rapidly.
So which news media programs do Americans actually trust? Surprisingly, the channel that most Americans said they trusted 100 percent of the time was The Weather Channel, at 52 percent. BBC, the British Broadcasting Network, is in second place at 39 percent, and PBS, the United States’ public broadcasting channel, is in third at 41 percent. These three channels don’t have a lot in common, but one thing they do have in common is that they rarely cover domestic politics. When it comes to domestic politics, CNN was the most polarizing, with a 55-point difference in support between Democrats and Republicans; The New York Times was the second most polarizing with a 49 percent difference.
What will it take for the media to regain public trust? Most experts agree the United States will never go back to an era of blind faith in the media. The answer is not simple, but intersectional and difficult: it involves empowering consumers and creating environments that support local media, the truth, and overcoming 21st century obstacles such as social media algorithms and lies from the heads of public institutions. The media still has a duty to society, and if it can learn how to play that role more effectively, then these confidence numbers might be earned back.
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