Do You Feel Confident in the Television News?

According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ confidence in television news is at an all-time low. In 1993, when Gallup first started tracking confidence in our news networks, 46% of adults expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. By last year, the percentage had dropped to 27%. This year, it’s even lower at 21%.

Interestingly, confidence levels dropped across almost all subgroups regardless of age, gender, political beliefs, or education. It used to be that conservatives were more skeptical of TV news than liberals and moderates. But in recent years, confidence within the latter two groups has plummeted and is now about even with conservatives.

“It is not clear precisely why Americans soured so much on television news this year compared with last,” read the Gallup report. “Americans' negativity likely reflects the continuation of a broader trend that appeared to enjoy only a brief respite last year. Americans have grown more negative about the media in recent years, as they have about many other U.S. institutions and the direction of the country in general.”

Gallup also went to great lengths to point out that this data was collected weeks before both CNN and Fox News mistakenly reported that the Supreme Court had found the Affordable Healthcare Act unconstitutional. It’s likely that this incident of erroneous reporting may have further soured Americans on television news.

So, what about you SodaHeads? Do you feel confident in the television news?