SHOCKING: Gallup Poll Exposes Historic Collapse In News Media Credibility

Public trust in the American news media has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in more than five decades of survey research on the question, with a new Gallup poll finding that only 28 percent of United States adults say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.

The findings, released by Gallup in October 2025 based on a telephone survey conducted from September 2 through September 16 among a random sample of one thousand American adults, mark the first time in the history of the polling organization’s long-running media trust series that confidence has fallen below 30 percent.

The result is down three percentage points from the 31 percent recorded in the prior year’s survey and has fallen by more than a third from the 40 percent figure recorded just five years earlier.

Seven in ten American adults now express either very little or no trust at all in the media’s ability to report the news accurately and fairly.

Thirty-six percent told Gallup they do not have very much trust in the mass media, while thirty-four percent said they have no trust at all, a combined skepticism figure of 70 percent that would have been almost unimaginable a generation ago.

The historical trajectory of the numbers reveals just how steep and sustained the decline has been.

When Gallup first began tracking the question in the early 1970s in the years following Watergate, between 68 and 72 percent of Americans said they trusted the mass media to report the news accurately.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, that majority had eroded to somewhere between 51 and 55 percent, still a majority but a significantly diminished one.

The latest reading of 28 percent represents less than half of what confidence stood at even in those already declining years.

The partisan breakdown of the current numbers is both stark and unsurprising to anyone who has watched the media trust story unfold over the past decade.

Republican confidence in the media has collapsed most dramatically, with just eight percent of GOP respondents expressing a great deal or fair amount of trust in the mass media in the most recent Gallup survey.

That figure marks the first time Republican media confidence has fallen into single digits since Gallup began measuring it.

In 2015, when Trump launched his first presidential campaign and began systematically framing much of the press as the enemy of the people and the purveyor of fake news, fewer than thirty percent of Republicans already reported no trust at all in the media.

That figure has now climbed to sixty-two percent.

Democratic confidence, while significantly higher than Republican confidence, has also declined and now stands at 51 percent, itself near a historical low for that party’s voters.

Independent confidence is at 27 percent, matching the record low Gallup had recorded in 2022.

The gap between Republican and Democratic media trust, at 43 points, is one of the largest partisan divergences Gallup has measured on any sustained question in recent survey history.

The generational divide overlaying the partisan one is equally pronounced.

Among Americans aged 65 and older, 43 percent say they trust the media in the most recent three-year aggregated data.

In every younger age group, that figure falls to 28 percent or below.

In the early 2000s, when the survey began catching both older and younger Americans in meaningful numbers, all age groups expressed roughly similar trust levels, hovering just above 50 percent across the board.

The divergence since then has been most dramatic among younger cohorts, whose confidence has fallen furthest and fastest.

The breadth of the collapse across demographic groups is significant precisely because it undercuts the simplest partisan explanation for the trend.

While the sharpest drops have occurred among Republican voters during the Trump era, the decline has not been exclusive to the right.

Democrats at 51 percent are nowhere near the 70 to 75 percent confidence levels their party’s voters expressed in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Independents have fallen to a record low. Young Americans across party lines express less confidence than their parents and grandparents. The media trust crisis, in other words, is not simply a story about Donald Trump calling journalists the enemy of the people, though that rhetoric has unquestionably accelerated specific dynamics within the Republican electorate.

The structural drivers of the decline are multiple and long-developing. The collapse of the local newspaper industry over the past two decades has eliminated hundreds of sources of information that Americans once trusted because they were proximate, covering schools, city councils, police departments, and communities they knew personally. What has filled that vacuum is a national media landscape increasingly dominated by a small number of large, ideologically identifiable outlets whose coverage of national political controversies is filtered through frames that large swaths of the public have come to view as predictable and partisan rather than genuinely independent.

Social media has compounded the dynamic by exposing audiences to a constant stream of corrections, contradictions, and criticisms of mainstream media coverage that did not exist when the same stories were delivered through a newspaper monopoly or a three-network television evening news broadcast. When errors occur, and they inevitably do in any large news operation, they now propagate at the speed of the internet rather than being quietly corrected in small print on page twelve.

The cable news model, which replaced traditional broadcast journalism as the dominant format for news consumption among politically engaged Americans, has also played a role.

Networks that have built their audiences on the assumption that viewers share a particular political orientation have, in different ways on the left and the right, reinforced the perception that national news organizations are advocacy operations in the clothes of journalism rather than genuinely independent fact-finding enterprises.

The consequences of the media trust collapse extend well beyond the business model challenges facing news organizations, though those challenges are serious. When fewer than three in ten Americans trust the basic news infrastructure of a democratic society to report accurately, the capacity of that society to share a common factual foundation for political debate is significantly degraded.

Arguments about policy become arguments about whether the underlying facts being cited are real, and the ability of reporting to hold powerful actors accountable diminishes in proportion to the share of the public that doubts the credibility of the reporting doing the accounting.

Gallup’s full historical data shows that even in the mid-1990s, the period often cited as the beginning of the current media trust decline with the rise of partisan talk radio and the early culture war debates, overall media confidence never fell below 51 percent.

The country has now watched that figure fall by nearly half in roughly thirty years, a pace of institutional confidence erosion that compares unfavorably with the simultaneous declines in confidence in Congress, the Supreme Court, organized religion, and other major American institutions.

The media’s own coverage of the Gallup data has been, as AllSides documented, notably sparse.

Major national outlets offered limited coverage of findings that reflected directly and unfavorably on their own industry, a pattern that critics on the right have pointed to as itself illustrative of the insularity that drives distrust.

Local news stations and smaller outlets carried the story more consistently, but the relative silence from major national operations was widely noted in media criticism circles.

The question of what, if anything, can reverse the trend is one that journalism schools, industry executives, press freedom advocates, and media critics have all wrestled with, and none have convincingly answered. Proposals have ranged from greater transparency about sourcing and editorial decision-making to structural reforms separating news from opinion to investments in local journalism as a building block for the kind of community trust that national media can no longer replicate.

What is clear from the Gallup data is that the current trajectory, if it continues, points toward a media environment in which the American press functions as a trusted institution for a vanishingly small minority of the public, a condition with no precedent in the post-World War II era and with implications for democratic governance that are difficult to overstate.

In the early 1970s, the American news media exposed both the Watergate conspiracy and the Pentagon Papers, and the public largely trusted it to do so.

Today, with 70 percent of Americans expressing minimal or no confidence in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fairly and accurately, the institutional credibility that made those historic acts of accountability journalism possible has been eroded to a degree that ought to alarm everyone, regardless of which particular outlets they blame for creating the problem.