44% of Americans believe the press invents negative stories about President Trump, including 74% of Republicans

Distrust of the news media didn’t start with Donald Trump, but he has amplified and stoked those doubts like no American president before him. Trump is also not the first politician to discredit any negative reporting on him, but his effort to undermine a shared understanding of facts conveyed in fair, vetted reporting takes a page from the playbooks of authoritarians in China, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.

As the year draws to a close, we wanted to assess the impact of a sustained campaign by the president to undercut the media as “fake news” and “enemies of the people.” In research commissioned for Poynter’s inaugural journalism ethics summit this month, political scientists at Dartmouth College, Princeton University and the University of Exeter found that Trump’s frequent attacks on journalists and threats to restrict press freedoms have widened a stark, partisan divide in attitudes toward the media. While Democrats have gained confidence in the press this year, Republicans’ confidence continued to erode. Strikingly, Republicans who were most tuned into the news were the least likely to trust the mainstream press. CONT.

Indira Lakshmanan, Poynter Institute