The death match between “Liar in Chief” Donald Trump and the “FAKE NEWS” media added another few brutal rounds last week involving a bloody “facelift” tweet, Trump “body-slamming” CNN, and blatantly false reports on a “dissed handshake.” So who’s winning, or perhaps more appropriately, who’s losing the war? A recent Marist poll provides an answer Trump’s nemesis is not going to appreciate.
In what one PBS NewsHour guest described as a “horrible trend,” a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that more Americans trust the Trump administration than they do the establishment media. While trust in both was quite poor, 7% more respondents said they put a “good amount” or “great deal” of trust in the Trump administration (37%) than said the same of the media (30%). Asked about their trust in polls, Americans also rated them slightly below Trump at 35%.
The partisan divide on trust in Trump goes about how you’d expect, with a vast majority of Trump supporters and Republicans expressing trust in Trump (86% and 84%, respectively) and most Democrats distrusting him (90% saying they either have “not very much” trust in his administration or “none at all”). Only 28% of Independents said they trust the administration.
But the most eye-opening numbers involve trust in the media: Only 56% of Democrats have a “good amount” or “great deal” trust in the media, while 42% said they don’t have very much or any at all. Republicans expressed even less trust in the Fourth Estate, only 9% saying they trusted it; a stunning 91% said they did not trust the media. Only 28% of Independents said they trust the media; more than two-thirds, 70%, said they did not trust the media. Oof.
Newsbusters highlighted NPR’s rather grim coverage of their deflating poll on Monday’s episode of NewsHour, which included a few gems from host Judy Woodruff and guests Stuart Rothenberg and Tamara Keith. After Woodruff pointed to the poll as more evidence that “the media may be a good whipping boy,” Rothenberg noted the precipitous decline in the media since the 1970s, decrying it as a “horrible trend,” one that Keith said “puts America at risk.”
WOODRUFF: I do want to raise, in our last few minutes, this new CNN — I’m sorry. I had CNN on the brain from the video — the new poll that the NewsHour and NPR did in conjunction with Marist, where one of the things we looked at was what Stu — exactly what you mentioned — high distrust of the news media.
More than two-thirds of Americans — they were asked, what do you think about trust in institutions? And here it is: 37%, a good deal or a great amount of trust in the Trump administration; 30% — even less — trust in the news, in the media. And twenty [nine], about on the same par as trust in Congress. And you go on to see trust in the intelligence community, twice that much, 60%, and in the courts, 60%.
But the bottom line here, Stu, is that the media may be a good whipping boy.
Rothenberg replied that “right now, nobody trusts politicians or people covering politicians. … It’s a horrible trend. I look back to Gallup numbers in the early 1970s, and those of us in the media are regarded much worse than we were back then. But it’s been occurring over the past couple of decades.”
Keith then chimed by citing Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, who faulted the president for “trying to weaponize distrust,” and said, “We are at risk of getting to a place where we don’t have a shared set of public facts. A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.”
“These numbers are part of a very long trend of institutions losing trust from the American people; and that makes — puts America at risk,” said Keith.
H/T Newsbusters, HotAir.