Trust but verify

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about claims that people had lost faith in the media because of the coverage of the Russian collusion story--the basic idea is that the media kept saying that the Mueller report would be a bombshell, so when it turned out  to be inconclusive, people felt like they had been sold a bill of goods.  I looked at two measures of trust in 2016 and the present, and found only small declines in both.  Of course, a lot has happened since the collusion story was big (the Mueller report was issued in the spring of 2019),  so it would be better to consider some intermediate points as well.  I'll do that in this post, using three different measures.   First, from a survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Institute "how much do you trust [the traditional media] for news and information?"

I have to show it as a screenshot (from an article in Axios--I got the reference from Andrew Gelman's blog) because I don't have access to the original data.*  The figures on the x-axis are misleading, because they refer to the year of the annual reports, which involve a survey taken late in the previous year.  That is, the last survey in the figure was taken in late 2020.  As of late 2019 ("20" on the x-axis, trust was about the same level as in 2016--that is, it hadn't suffered during the time that the investigation was a big story.  It did fall a lot between late 2019 and late 2020--there are a lot of candidates for what might have caused that change.  

Second, the Reuters Digital News Report, which has annual surveys conducted early in the year.  I show results for two questions:  whether you can trust "most news most of the time" and whether you can trust "news sources that you use."

Trust in the news sources that you use has declined steadily--general trust in news rose from 2015 to 2017 and then declined steadily.  The 2019-20 decline was just about the same as the declines in 2017-8 and 2018-9.    

Finally, a question on trust in the media to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly," measured on a four point scale.  Gallup has done this question annually (in September) in recent years, and a few other news organizations have asked it from time to time.

By this measure, confidence increased in the first years of the Trump administration, but then declined from 2018 to 2019.  You could say that was a reaction to the way the collusion story ended, but the declines have continued.  

There are some differences between the paths of the three measures, and since lots of things are happening at any time, it's difficult to identify the impact of any specific event.  But there's nothing here to support the idea that the inconclusive end of the collusion story caused confidence to collapse.  That implies that trust should have been substantially lower in the second half of 2019 than it was in 2016, which wasn't the case.  

*They had another question about whether you can trust the media to "do what is right,"  which I looked in my previous post.   The results for the question on "trust for news and information" are not regularly included on their annual report--that Axios story says the data were "shared exclusively with Axios."  (Edelman seems to be a management consulting firm which charges for access to their data--the reports just give a taste).  

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]