Quote:Each year, the American people seem to trust the media less and less.

This year’s annual survey from Edelman shows trust in traditional media and social media are at all-time lows. The annual trust barometer, shared exclusively with Axios, found fewer than half of Americans trust traditional media for the first time since the survey began.

56% of Americans agree with the statement that “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

58% think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”

When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.

The media doesn’t seem interested in repairing that trust. The first person Axios quoted about the problem was a woman trying to correct misinformation about vaccines – a laudable goal – but who told The New York Times: “[W]e don’t have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.”

Except, media misinformation really is the problem for many Americans. The media regularly gets stories wrong, particularly big stories, with disastrous results. Immediately reporting on police shootings, for example, led to riots and billions of dollars in damage to innocent businesses because the media routinely misreports the facts surrounding those police shootings.