If you want to know why big media outlets are struggling so badly, you only need to look at the coverage of this month's presidential election. Not only were the media perceived by voters as favoring Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris, but they continued to show an erosion in Americans' overall trust in them as sources of information, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
The November national online poll includes 1,436 adults, with a +/-2.6 percentage point margin of error.
Each month, I&I/TIPP asks voters the following questions about the national media:
"Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?"
And, "Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?"
Respondents are given a number of possible responses to both questions, including: "A lot of trust," "Quite a bit of trust," "Little trust," "No trust at all," and "Not sure."
In keeping with the recent trend, the overall trust picture for the media is not a pretty one to behold.
For the first question, overall just 29% said they either had a lot of trust (10%) or quite a bit of trust (19%), while 64% said they had either little trust (32%) or no trust (32%) in the big traditional media. A total of just 7% said they were not sure.
Significantly, none of the three major political groupings followed by I&I/TIPP – the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and independents/third parties – show a majority having trust in either of the big media categories.
Democrats came closest to showing a majority, with 48% expressing "trust," and 44% saying "no trust." That compares with Republicans at 17% in the trust category, and 78% in the no trust group. Independents came in at 23% and 73% for the "trust"/"no trust" gauges.
What about the other large outlets in the "alternative media" category? They fare even worse.
There, only 24% said they either had a lot of trust (6%) or quite a bit of trust (18%). Two-thirds (67%) said they either had little trust (38%) or no trust (29%), 8% not sure.
By party: 34% of Democrats trust the media while 56% do not; among Republicans, 22% trust the media while 74% do not; and among independents and third-party voters, the trust-to-distrust ratio is 19% to 76%.
The media are finding out that when you're no longer trusted, your business model based on stable, trusting readers and viewers falls apart.
But this month, I&I/TIPP added two election-related questions to probe how the media functioned during the two presidential campaigns.
The first, poll respondents were asked to what degree they agreed or disagreed with the following statement:
"The news media worked in favor of Kamala Harris's candidacy and against Donald Trump in the lead-up to the election."
Possible answers included "Agree strongly," "Agree somewhat," "Disagree somewhat," "Disagree strongly," and "Not sure."
Among those responding, 53% said they either agreed strongly (33%) or somewhat (20%), while 34% disagreed either strongly (19%) or somewhat (15%). Another 13% were not sure.
Once again the right-left-center political schism was very much in evidence, with only 33% of Dems agreeing and a 56% majority disagreeing. That was flipped on its head among Republicans, with a hefty 79% agreeing and only 13% disagreeing. Independents once again found middle ground, at 51% agree and 33% disagree.
As a follow-on question, voters were asked to agree or disagree with this statement: "Media coverage intended to support Kamala Harris ultimately harmed her campaign."
This time, a plurality of 45% agreed either strongly (25%) or somewhat (20%), with a sizable 23% not sure.
A third of Democrats (33%) agreed, while 45% disagreed. Among the GOP faithful, however, a majority of 57% thought the favorable coverage hurt Kamala's campaign, versus 23% who didn't agree. And a plurality of independents, 48%, agreed Kamala's run was damaged by the perceived media support, while 29% disagreed.
Major media outlets should be alarmed at this. It shows not just that they remain mired in their readers' minds as untrustworthy, but overtly biased in favor of one political side versus the other.
This shows up right now in the media's current crisis, with once-powerful outlets hemorrhaging readers and advertisers, and losing piles of money just staying in business. Meanwhile, readers and viewers are moving to social media and niche news sites on the web.
One example: MSNBC. It has lost viewers as its coverage of politics has veered sharply leftward. Its future looks grim. It lost 54% of its viewership in the three days following Trump's presidential triumph, while Fox News jumped 61% during the same time, according to Nielsen Media Research data.
Of course, many were interested in what insights conservative-leaning Fox might have into Trump's new administration, so that might explain its sharp viewership gain.
But MSNBC, and its centrist cousin CNBC, have been put up for sale by their owner, Comcast, which still holds on to NBC. And none other than DOGE co-leader Elon Musk has expressed interest in buying MSNBC.
Meanwhile, left-leaning, Harris-supporting MSNBC is slashing pay for top talents, such as Rachel Maddow, whose take-home pay was cut by a reported $5 million (don't worry, she'll still make $25 million a year).
Some at MSNBC got the message: MSNBC’s morning show co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski actually visited with President-elect Donald Trump shortly after the election to mend fences after months of name-calling.
“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” Brzezinski said after the visit. “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
MSNBC is only the latest of the big media properties to reveal deep-seated problems, including losing boatloads of subscribers and, perhaps more seriously, boatloads of money.
The Washington Post just fired its lead political editor and revealed that it expects to lose $77 million this year, and that was before it lost 250,000 subscribers over its refusal to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
CNN has lost viewers, damaging its bottom line and its reputation as a go-to news source. During the just-finished presidential campaign, it averaged a little more than 5.1 million primetime viewers (just ahead of CBS), behind MSNBC's 6 million and Fox's 10 million.
CNN will now "undergo massive layoffs, budget cuts after disappointing election ratings," according to a recent headline in the Washington Times. And all the Big Three TV news networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, face shrinking audiences, and profits, for their once-dominant news-gathering operations.
At the Los Angeles Times, writers and editors have been in open revolt after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has vowed to bring "balance" back to the publication, which has veered sharply leftward in recent years, leaving many of its moderate and conservative readers with no place to go but other media.
The list goes on and on. A big problem for the legacy media, often unacknowledged, is bias.
A report by the conservative media watchdog Media Research Center "showed evaluative coverage of Harris — excluding 'horse race' assessments — on ABC, CBS and NBC was 78% positive vs. 22% negative. For Trump, those numbers were flipped: just 15% positive press, vs. 85% negative coverage."
And, as I&I/TIPP's own data show, Americans saw in the most recent election the media openly twisting coverage of the election campaign to favor Harris over Trump.
The old media "are dead," according to an X tweet from Matt Walsh of The Daily Signal. “Their ability to set the narrative has been destroyed. Trump declared war on the media in 2016. Tonight he vanquished them completely. They will never be relevant again.”
An unnamed TV executive, speaking to New York Magazine, was even more blunt:
“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely,” the executive told New York. “A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after.”
Perhaps it's good that some in the media know something's wrong. But will they figure it all out soon enough? After years of losing readers, revenues and public trust, it may well be too late for most of them.
I&I/TIPP publishes timely, unique, and informative data each month on topics of public interest. TIPP’s reputation for polling excellence comes from being the most accurate pollster for the past six presidential elections.
Terry Jones is an editor of Issues & Insights. His four decades of journalism experience include serving as national issues editor, economics editor, and editorial page editor for Investor’s Business Daily.
