Afterthoughts

 
Following up on a couple of points from recent posts:

1.  I noted that confidence in newspapers held steady or rose during the Trump years.  Confidence in TV news rose from 2016 to 2017, and then declined, but it's been declining pretty steadily since the 1990s.  Overall, nothing particularly unusual happened to confidence in the media during the Trump years, although " many observers (especially but not exclusively on the right) claim that people lost confidence in the media during the Trump years as many journalists moved away from their traditional efforts to appear neutral."  A few days ago, Ross Douthat had a column making exactly that claim:  "from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the self-understanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump . . . the public’s trust in the national press declined during the Trump era."  My post used data from Gallup, and he links to data from Pew.  Do they point in different directions?  The Pew question is "how much, if at all, do you trust the information that comes from each of the following?"--answers are a lot, some, not too much, and not at all.  The Gallup questions are asked once a year, in May or June, and the Pew questions are asked at irregular intervals starting in 2016.  The Pew survey asks about national and local "news organizations"--here is a graph of the averages (higher numbers mean more trust):

No change from February 2016 to July 2019, and then a drop between July and November 2019.  The next survey was in June 2021, and it showed a drop from November 2019.  The timing doesn't fit Douthat's argument, which implies that there should have been an immediate drop starting when Trump took office (the second survey was in March 2017).  Also, Douthat specified the "national press," but trust in national and local news organizations also followed a very similar pattern (a correlation of .95).  That suggests that variations reflected a general trust factor (either real temporal variation or sampling variation), not a reaction to changes in national news coverage.  

2.  In recent years, the national Democratic party has united against any restrictions on abortion.  In my last post, I observed that this position is not very popular among the public:  in a recent survey, 15% said it should be legal in all cases during the second trimester and 35% said that it should be illegal in all; in the third trimester, the figures were 8% and 54%.  But when asked to choose between the Democrats and Republicans on abortion, more people favor the Democrats.  A 2019 poll by Marist College asked "Do you think the Democratic Party or the Republican Party would do a better job of dealing with the issue of abortion?":  46% said the Democrats and 33% the Republicans (the rest said they would be the same or that they were unsure).  Why?  Some of it may be the focus on Roe v. Wade:  many people seem to be under the impression that overturning it would mean a national ban on abortion.  The Marist poll had a question about general view of abortion, with the options of available any time (17%), only in the first six months (11%), only the first three months (22%), only rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman (28%), only to save the life (9%), or never (9%).  They also had a question about a candidate who "would appoint justices to the Supreme court to limit or overturn Roe vs. Wade":  options were would vote for, would vote for but with reservations, and would definitely not vote for.  A cross tabulation:

                         Would     With Reservations        Definitely not    Not sure

Always                8%                   7%                          79%                   6%

Six months          3%                 10%                          84%                   3%

Three months      5%                 18%                          63%                  13%

Rape, Incest       24%                 26%                          36%                  14%

Life only            47%                 14%                         19%                   20%

Never                 65%                   7%                         19%                     9%

Roe vs. Wade basically found that abortions should be allowed in the first six months, but most of the people who say that they should be limited to the first three months, and 36% of those who say they should be allowed only in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life say that they would definitely not vote for a candidate who would appoint justices to overturn the decision.  But this raises the question of why so many people have a mistaken impression about a long-standing issue. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]