Most Americans in a new survey said they have little confidence that the news media can cover President Trump with fairness and accuracy.
The YouGov poll, published Friday, found that 67 percent of U.S. respondents said that they don’t have “very much” or any trust that news outlets can state facts fairly, accurately and fully while covering Trump’s second term. Around a quarter, 24 percent, said they have a “fair amount” of confidence while only 4 percent had a “great deal” of confidence in the press’s coverage of the president.
Another 5 percent were not sure about the matter, per the survey.
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On the opposite side, a great number of people — 44 percent — have at least a “fair amount” of confidence in the Trump administration to relay the facts with fairness and accuracy, outpacing the news media whose trust among the public has been on a decline for some time, according to the poll.
Still, just over half of respondents, 51 percent, said they did not have much hope in the current administration to present the facts with accuracy and fairness. Some five percent were unsure, the data shows.
Republican voters, 35 percent, are more likely than Democrats, 13 percent, to state that they have zero trust in the news media, according to the survey.
The poll also discovered that a quarter of Americans think news organizations’ coverage of Trump’s second foray into the White House has been about right. A greater number, 35 percent, said the coverage has been “too negative.” Another 23 percent argued it was “too positive,” showing an uptick from 2017 when it stood at 14 percent, the pollsters noted.
A large share of Democrats, 42 percent, think the coverage has been too positive while nearly two-thirds of Republicans, 63 percent, said it has been too negative so far, the poll found.
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Most Americans, 59 percent, argued that the media’s reporting of Trump and his administration should be “neutral,” but only 16 percent think news outlets are succeeding in that quest. Around 22 percent said news organizations should want the president to “succeed” in the next four years. Some 10 percent said the opposite while 9 percent were unsure.
Just over a quarter, 26 percent, including 42 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans, said they believed the media was neutral when covering Trump following his 2016 election victory, according to the survey.
Trump has long been critical of news outlets’ coverage of him — a sometimes-tense relationship that goes back to his 2016 White House bid. The tirade has continued during this term, with the president recently claiming that The Associated Press (AP), public broadcaster PBS and CBS News have treated him unfairly, while he proclaimed liberal network MSNBC as “the enemy.”
The president has also threatened to utilize the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke NBC and ABC’s broadcast licenses.
He banned the AP from accessing the Oval Office and Air Force One over the news wires’ refusal to alter the Gulf of Mexico’s name to “Gulf of America” in its stylebook. In response, the news wire filed a lawsuit against three White House officials on Friday, saying their First Amendment rights were violated.
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“The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech. Allowing such government control and retaliation to stand is a threat to every American’s freedom,” the AP said in the lawsuit assigned to U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by Trump.
Trump’s legal team also sued CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview last October that he said portrayed former Vice President Harris in a positive manner, therefore engaging in “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion.”
The YouGov poll was conducted from Jan. 30 to Feb. 3 among 1,124 adults. The margin of error was 4 percentage points.
