• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, October 13, 2015

According to a new Gallup Poll, reported by Rebecca Riffkin, only four in 10 Americans say they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in the mass media (newspapers, TV, and radio) to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, tying the historical lows on this measure set in 2014 and 2012.

Americans' confidence in the media has slowly eroded from a high of 55% in 1998 and 1999. Since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media, says the report. Trust has typically dipped in election years, including 2004, 2008, 2012 and last year.

This decline follows the same trajectory as Americans' confidence in many institutions and their declining trust in the federal government's ability to handle domestic and international problems over the same time period, says the report.

Trust in the media continues to be significantly lower among Americans aged 18 to 49 than among those 50 and older, continuing a pattern evident since 2012. Prior to 2012, these groups' trust levels were more similar, with a few exceptions between 2005 and 2008.

For more than a decade, Republicans and independents have been significantly less likely than Democrats to trust the media, says the report, continuing in the latest survey. In 2014, Gallup found that trust among Democrats fell to a 14-year low of 54%, and is essentially unchanged at 55% this year. The percentage of Republicans who report that they trust the mass media increased slightly this year, from 27% to 32%, offset, however, by a decrease in independents reporting trust, from 38% to 33%, says the report.

The report concludes with this “Bottom Line:” Americans' trust level in the media has drifted downward over the past decade, but some of the loss in trust may have been self-inflicted, as major venerable news organizations have been caught making serious mistakes in the past several years.

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 9-13, 2015, with a random sample of 1,025 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

For additional information from Gallup, please visit here.