A partisan split on trust in the US news media has widened in recent years in the wake of attacks on the press by US President Donald Trump, a survey showed Friday. The Pew Research Center poll found growing polarization among Americans in their views, with Democrats and Republicans trusting "two nearly inverse news media environments," according to researchers.
"Evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years," Pew researchers said. They added that Republicans "have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats' confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened."
The findings confirm a growing partisan divide among Americans in their views on the media following repeated criticism from the president, who has called some outlets "the enemy of the people." The largest erosion in trust has occurred in news outlets targeted by Trump.
For CNN, distrust among Republicans has increased from 33 percent in 2014 to 58 percent; mistrust of the Washington Post rose from 22 to 39 percent and for the New York Times from 29 to 42 percent. While more than two-thirds of Republicans trust Trump favorite Fox News, the opposite is true for Democrats, 61 percent of whom distrust the cable TV channel controlled by the Murdoch family.
The findings show that for Republicans, Fox News "towers above" all other news outlets, according to Pew. "It would be hard to overstate its connection as a trusted go-to source of political news for Republicans," according to the report.
Of the 30 news organizations cited in the survey, a majority of Democrats largely trusted 22 of them, while Republicans distrusted 20 of the media outlets. A majority of Democrats expressed trust not only in CNN but in the other established TV networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS, while fewer than half of Republicans trusted any of these.
A starker difference was seen for the New York Times, trusted by 53 percent of Democrats, and the Washington Post (47 percent), with trust more than three times higher than for Republicans. The report is based on a survey of 12,043 US adults conducted between October 29 and November 11, 2019, with an estimated margin of sampling error of 1.43 percentage points.
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