It’s no secret that political polarization plays a big role in determining which news outlets Americans tune into. But a new survey hints at something different, and more troubling: Republicans appear to be developing a mistrust of most news operations altogether. The MAGA “fake news” smears have metastasized into a deeper problem.
A recent survey of 1,500 Americans conducted by YouGov, a British internet-based analytics firm, documents how much — or how little — Americans trust scores of different media outlets. When broken down by partisan affiliation, at first blush the results seem predictable, with Democrats reporting much higher net trust than Republicans in many mainstream centrist or center-left media outlets, such as the Associated Press and PBS.
The picture that emerges from these poll results is that Republicans are extremely mistrustful of the media landscape as a whole.
But Vox’s Zack Beauchamp flagged something surprising in the poll: More Democrats than Republicans report trust in many conservative media outlets, including the Daily Caller, the New York Post and the Washington Examiner. For example, when it comes to National Review, a conservative journal founded by the famous conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, Democrats’ net trust in the magazine comes in at 20%, while Republicans’ is a mere 3%. The New York Post, an iconic right-wing tabloid, shows similar margins. (Net trust was calculated by the difference between the percentages of people who say an outlet is trustworthy or very trustworthy, and those who say it is untrustworthy or very untrustworthy. People who say they didn’t know or declined to assign trustworthiness were not included in the calculation.)
In fact, the survey found only a handful of media outlets that are trusted more by Republicans than Democrats, including Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart News and One America News. Notably, out of all these outlets, Fox News is the only media outlet…
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