By Nick Catoggio
Monday, October 05, 2026
If I told you that Americans are less likely to trust
mass media now than they were in 2020, would it surprise you?
Surely not. America reelected Donald Trump, the grim
reaper of trust in social institutions. Millions now get their “news”
from confectioneries like TikTok and podcasts instead of from journalists. We
live in a civilization that’s growing increasingly postliterate as adults rely more heavily on
smartphones and artificial intelligence as intellectual crutches. What else
could the trend be but downward, right?
The trend is, in fact, downward. A new poll published
last week by Gallup placed trust at 33 percent among all Americans, down
from 40 percent in the final year of Trump’s first term.
Now, if you had to guess how trust in mass media has been
trending within the two major parties since 2020, what would you say?
That also seems easy, I would have said. With Trump back
in office, the parties have presumably done what they always do: They’ve
polarized. Trust in mass media among Democrats has likely soared as the press
has gotten to work exposing presidential malfeasance. Trust in the “fake news”
among Republicans has probably collapsed for the same reason.
Wrong, wrong, wrong:
Trust in mass media among Democrats is down 23
points since 2020 and up 12 points among Republicans over the same
period. And no, the 2020 data isn’t some odd artifact of the pandemic. If we
use 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, as a point of comparison
instead, the numbers are nearly the same. Trust in the press is down 22 points
on the left and up 8 points on the right.
What’s weird is that my theory about the parties
polarizing around Trump was correct—during his first term. In 2017, trust in
the media surged 21 points among Democrats from the year before and remained
lofty throughout the president’s time in office. Among Republicans, it fell 18
points between 2015, when he entered politics, and 2016, when he became the
party’s nominee, and never recovered. The right’s trust in mass media has
hovered around 12 percent ever since (except for in 2018), a level of sourness
it never approached in the 40 years beforehand.
Where things get really weird, though, is how opinion has
shifted over the past year.
We can navel-gaze about why Democrats lost faith in the
media while Republicans gained it in the six years since 2020, but surely
Trump’s crumbling popularity in 2026 should have reversed those trends. With a
blue wave gathering ahead of the midterms, I would have expected the right to
scapegoat the press for its hero’s declining political fortunes, causing
Republican trust in media to drop sharply, and the left to credit the media’s
skeptical coverage for driving the president’s numbers downward, causing Democratic
trust to spike.
Wrong, wrong, wrong again. Faith in the media is up 14
points(!) among Republicans since 2025, more than double its all-time low of 8
percent last year. Meanwhile, among Democrats, trust has actually dropped a
point.
What on earth is going on?
Strange new respect.
The tricky part in trying to interpret data like this
when you’re a news junkie is to avoid imputing your own freakishly high degree
of media literacy to the general population.
For instance, my editor suggested this morning that
rising Republican trust in the media could be a reaction to Trump courtier
David Ellison installing MAGA-friendly Bari Weiss as head honcho at CBS News. I
think there’s something to that—but it gets us into thorny speculation about
how conscious the average right-winger is of hires in the media industry.
Ask the average Republican voter what they think of Bari
Weiss and I suspect they’d say, “Barry? Who’s he?”
Still, given all the hand-wringing in the press about
Ellison’s takeover of CBS and now CNN, it does seem plausible that the wider GOP base
has an inkling that the so-called mainstream media is drifting rightward.
Combine that with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s noisy mafioso
attempts to compel more flattering coverage of Republicans on broadcast
networks, and the right does have reason to believe that “fairness” in mass
media is trending in the right direction.
Another possibility: Maybe populist right-wing media has
grown so grotesque and self-parodying
that it’s begun to inspire Strange New Respect for outlets like the New York
Times in some conservatives. Remember, polling shows that a low-key mutiny
against the president among
“non-MAGA Republicans” is in progress. If some in the GOP have grown
disgusted with Trumpy populism, it stands to reason that they might also have
grown disgusted with its mouthpieces.
I’m too much of a pessimist to place much stock in that
theory, but the hard truth is that what used to be known as “conservative
media” now consists almost exclusively of brain-dead Trumpist house organs on
the one hand and unspeakably repellent postliberal goblins on the other. Your
choice as a right-wing media consumer in 2026 is between Fox News
propagandizing on behalf of the president and podcasters propagandizing on
behalf of Hitler.
CNN’s bias doesn’t sound so bad by comparison anymore,
does it?
I do think that a faction of the right has developed
“Strange New Respect” for the mainstream media, but the reason has little to do
with moral revulsion at the latest theory about Erika Kirk conspiring with
Emmanuel Macron’s transgender wife to assassinate Charlie or whatever.
The bigger liar.
The likely, and much simpler, truth is that some
Republicans have belatedly figured out—gasp—that the president lies to
them.
It took a foreign policy disaster and a global energy
crisis to clue them in. But seven months of being gaslit by Trump about the progress of the war with Iran,
followed by endless White House happy talk about the alleged magnificence of an economy in which diesel costs
six bucks a gallon, has created a test of credibility between the president and
the media in which Republican voters can see with their own eyes which
side is shooting straight with them. The truth is right in front of them, every
day, at the gas station and the supermarket.
There’s no reason in principle why the credibility of
institutions should be measured against one another’s. One could, in theory,
make separate and independent determinations about how much to trust the
president and how much to trust the media. But the sort of demagoguery on which
Trump thrives doesn’t allow for such things: Every threat to his authority
becomes an “us and them” litmus test, and so every factual dispute between him
and the press is reduced to a gut check for right-wingers about whether they
trust him more or the media more.
After Iran and the oil crunch, 22 percent of Republicans
might now be prepared to say they trust the media more. What the president has
lost in credibility as a truth-teller, the press may have gained.
The shadow he casts over national politics looms so large
now that it probably colors how Americans see all sorts of civic actors and
institutions, not just the press. The Times’ Nate Cohn noted a remarkable trend in his paper’s latest
Senate polling in five Republican strongholds (Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and
Texas): “In all five states, more voters view the Democrat favorably than
unfavorably, while more voters view the Republican candidate unfavorably than
favorably.” That’s easy to understand in Texas, where the GOP nominee is the
execrable Ken Paxton, but it’s not so easy in the other four.
Is it due to the high “candidate quality” of the
Democrats on the ballot in those states, as Cohn theorizes? Or is it due to
voters having grown wise to the fact that the president is running the
most preposterously flagrant corruption racket in American history, causing
them to draw conclusions about the lousy character of his many Republican
enablers?
The credibility of mass media, like the credibility of
GOP candidates, now rises or falls relative to the credibility of our would-be
Caesar. That explains why trust in the press is climbing among disaffected
Republicans.
But it sure doesn’t explain why trust in the press is
falling among Democrats, does it?
Losing faith.
If rising respect for the media on the right over the
past year is a matter of “Trump bad, therefore media good,” shouldn’t the same
thing be happening on the left?
It happened during the president’s first term, as I
pointed out earlier. From 2017 through 2020, the share of Democrats expressing
confidence in the media never dropped below 69 percent; not since the 1970s had
it reached such heights within the party. The so-called Resistance clearly
regarded the American press (especially its coverage of Trump’s dealings with
Russia, I’m sure) as a vital ally in the struggle to save liberal democracy.
No more, it seems. At 50 percent, the share of Democrats
today who say they trust the media is the lowest ever recorded by Gallup. Lower
even than during the Iraq War, when progressives flogged the press routinely
for having been too credulous about George W. Bush’s claims about Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
If nothing else, you’d expect the impending election to
have goosed the left’s trust in the press a bit. That’s what seems to have
happened in 2018, when trust in the media suddenly rose across all three
partisan groups. The midterm that year produced massive Democratic gains in the
House due to dissatisfaction with Trump; presumably, as voters began tilting
toward Democratic candidates during the campaign, they also began to find the
media’s skeptical tone about the president more simpatico with their own views.
Their trust grew accordingly.
Now here we are again, eight years later, and another
blue wave is inbound. Again, the press’s hostility to Trump is aligned with
public sentiment. But this time, per Gallup, the de facto Democratic position
seems to be “Trump bad, media … also pretty bad.” Huh?
Even stranger is when the left’s faith in media began to
wane, according to the data. It wasn’t when Trump returned to office in 2025 or
during the campaign of 2024. It was a year earlier, in 2023, when Democrats’
trust in the press fell all the way from 70 percent in 2022 to 58 percent.
(Each year since has brought further, albeit more modest, declines.) The big
drop wasn’t a reaction to the current president. It appears to have been a
reaction to Joe Biden.
But to what, specifically?
We can speculate. Biden began to run for reelection in
2023, and not coincidentally, that was the year that the press and pollsters began to pay (some) attention to his ability to
serve another four-year term. Some Democrats may have felt annoyed by what they
believed at the time to be a smear campaign aimed at impugning their
fit-as-a-fiddle leader’s steel-trap mind.
Others may have resented the dour reporting on “Bidenomics” despite the improving
fundamentals. (The idea that public dissatisfaction with the economy was
largely a function of “vibes” was very much a thing among Democratic talking
heads at the time.) I’d be tempted to theorize that press coverage of Hamas’
October 7 massacre in Israel that year also drove the shift in Democratic
opinion, but Gallup’s 2023 survey on trust in media was conducted in September.
I doubt that the 2023 shift in left-wing opinion about
the press was driven by any single grievance with the media, actually. Or by
any grievance with the media at all.
Populism and the media.
My guess is that the shift was a byproduct of Democratic
voters finally moving on from Trump and postliberalism as the threats around
which their party’s politics principally revolve. After a hard year of
inflation in 2022 and lingering economic aftershocks, 2023 may have been the
year that the cost of living gradually began to displace the former (and
future) president as the left’s core concern.
Coupled with the growing disenchantment with Biden at the
time, we might come to see 2023 in hindsight as the genesis of left-wing
populism on affordability that’s threatening to wash away Republicans at the
polls and that’s made democratic socialism momentarily electorally viable. And
if that’s true, it’s no surprise that Democratic confidence in the press began
to fade at around the same time: Because the mainstream media is always and
everywhere viewed as an ally of the political establishment, any faction that’s
trending populist will also trend toward greater distrust of the media.
Look back at the graph above, and you’ll find an almost
perfect barometer of how populist the two parties have been at any given moment
over the last decade. Republicans’ trust in the press was almost identical to
independents’ in 2015, then nosedived immediately in 2016 once Trump took over
the party. Now, with the president facing lame-duckery and retirement, his grip
on the GOP is relaxing and confidence in the media is recovering.
Democrats, meanwhile, exhibited sky-high trust in the
media during Trump’s first term, when they positioned themselves as defenders
of the traditional American liberal order against an authoritarian insurgency.
But now they’ve moved on, possibly because that battle was lost when voters
chose authoritarianism a second time (a fat lot of good the media’s skeptical
Trump coverage did the first time around!), possibly because making ends meet
has replaced containing authoritarianism as the most urgent problem of the age.
Their investment in the press has declined accordingly.
If my read on populism and confidence in the media is
correct, then Gallup’s poll reveals growing exhaustion with populism on the
right and growing interest in it on the left. The data is an insight into how
much each side wishes to return to the traditional political status quo. For a
smallish but meaningful minority of right-wingers exhausted by tariffs and
pricey gas and the Trump of it all, the old status quo seems less bad than it
used to. For a largeish and growing minority of left-wingers whose own populist
faction hasn’t yet had a crack at governing, it seems worse than what might
await.
Who knows? In a year or two we might see the share of
Democrats who trust the media settle in the low 50s and the share of
Republicans settle in the high 20s or low 30s—precisely where the two
parties stood in 2015, the last year of the Before Times. If you’re
starving for evidence that the Trump era really is winding down, with the president’s
hyperpolarizing effect on opinion diminishing, there you have it. We’re headed
back toward “normal” partisan opinions about media bias, it seems. Normalcy
can’t come soon enough.
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