Surveys about “media trust” suffer from a definitional problem. “Do you trust the media?” is a meaningful question only if we know what “the media” is. Is it The New York Times and CNN? Fox News and Breitbart? Occupy Democrats and your uncle’s memes on Facebook? …
All this is to say that I find trust questions about specific news organizations a bit more useful, since you know with much greater confidence what the person being queried has in mind. And we have a new data set looking at just that, from Simmons Research.
Simmons surveyed 2,009 Americans in August asking them whether or not they trusted 38 different news organizations. Here are the results: CONT.
Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab