Media Trust Statistics
How much do Americans trust the media?
Gallup's long-running survey shows public trust in U.S. mass media falling from roughly 68% in 1972 to 28% in 2025, measured as the share with a great deal or fair amount of confidence in reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The decline tracks the shift from broadcast scarcity to digital abundance.
- Gallup: trust in mass media fell from about 68% (1972) to 28% (2025).
- The measure asks about confidence in full, accurate, and fair reporting.
- Fewer than 30% of Americans regularly rely on a shared set of mainstream outlets.
- The decline is structural and tracks changes in media economics and regulation.
- Low institutional trust does not mean low media consumption; it means dispersed consumption.
The headline number and what it measures
Gallup has asked a consistent question since the 1970s: how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly? Combining the great deal and fair amount responses, the figure stood at roughly 68% in 1972 and 28% in 2025. Because the wording has stayed stable, the series is one of the few clean long-run measures of institutional trust in American media. It measures perceived reliability, not consumption volume.
The decline is structural, not sudden
There is no single year in which trust collapsed. The series declines in stages that line up with structural changes: the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, cable news expansion through the 1990s, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the consolidation that followed, and the arrival of algorithmic social feeds after 2006. Each stage increased the number of available outlets and reduced the pressure on any one of them to serve a broad audience.
Fragmentation of sources
Fewer than 30% of Americans now regularly rely on a common set of mainstream news outlets. More than half report regularly encountering directly contradicting accounts of the same event without a clear way to determine which is accurate. This is the practical meaning of low trust: not that people have stopped consuming news, but that consumption has dispersed across sources with different standards, different incentives, and no shared arbitration mechanism.
How to read trust statistics carefully
Trust figures vary widely by question wording. Confidence in the mass media as an institution polls far lower than trust in the specific outlets a respondent personally uses, and trust in local news polls higher than trust in national news. Comparisons across polls with different wording are usually not valid. When citing a number, cite the instrument. The Gallup series is useful precisely because it holds the wording constant across five decades.