Distrust in the media helped Trump in 2024. The cottage industry of center-right and independent media outlets it spawned continues to help him.
Jeff Bezos wasn’t wrong when he warned last October: “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”
In fact, Bezos was probably gentler than the numbers deserve. Gallup now reports only 28% of Americans say they trust the media even a “fair amount,” while 70% say they have little or none. That’s not a slump. That’s structural collapse. And it didn’t suddenly materialize in 2024 — it was decades in the making.
Trust in national media has been deteriorating since the early 2000s, but over the last five years, it hit bedrock. By 2024, Gallup’s surveys had journalists ranked below Congress in public trust — something that would have sounded like satire twenty years ago.
Yet here we are.
The media didn’t lose Trump voters; it lost the country
If Donald Trump’s 2024 victory demonstrated anything, it’s that distrust in the press has become a bipartisan fact of American life.
Democrats may dislike Trump, but even they show declining confidence in the media’s ability to serve as an honest broker. Independents — the swing voters every campaign claims to court — are even more skeptical. When the traditional press speaks, most Americans either tune it out or weigh it against alternative sources they trust more.
This is why Trump didn’t need to run against “the media” in 2024 as aggressively as he did in 2016. The distrust was already baked in. A country that doesn’t trust its referees will never trust their calls. And now, one year into Trump’s second term, that distrust remains one of the defining characteristics of our information ecosystem.
The Washington Post canary in the coal mine
The meltdown at The Washington Post last fall proved the point. When the paper abruptly announced it wouldn’t endorse any presidential candidate — after years of reliably endorsing Democrats — more than 200,000 subscribers canceled within days, according to internal tallies reported by Reuters and NPR.
Columnists resigned. Editorial board members stepped down. Staffers accused the owner of interfering. It was chaos.
Jeff Bezos framed the decision as an attempt to reduce the perception of bias and earn back public trust. Maybe that was the intent. But the timing, the confusion, and the internal revolt only reinforced what millions of Americans already believed: our major news institutions are no longer stable, neutral civic actors. They are partisans with printing presses — sometimes warring even among themselves.
When a single editorial decision can trigger a quarter-million subscription revolt, it’s not just a business problem. It’s a legitimacy problem.
Which is why:
The parallel media universe effect
While legacy outlets were unraveling, something else was happening: millions of Americans quietly migrated to a new, sprawling network of right-leaning, center-right, and independent platforms.
These aren’t fringe outlets anymore; they are the normal information diet for huge chunks of the public.
Pew’s latest national media survey shows Republicans and Democrats now live in “mirror-image media worlds” — each side trusting one universe of outlets and deeply suspicious of the other. Democrats continue to rely on the traditional prestige brands. Republicans rely on Fox, Newsmax, the Daily Wire, and a constellation of popular podcasts and independent journalists.
But here’s the part that matters most: it’s not only Republicans making the shift. A sizable number of independents — and even moderate Democrats — say they now rely on multiple nontraditional sources because they don’t believe any single outlet provides the whole truth.
Call it fragmentation. Call it decentralization. Call it democratization. Whatever the label, it’s here to stay.
Distrust didn’t grow because the audience suddenly became irrational or conspiratorial. It grew because too many people saw: selective coverage framed as universal truth, ideological uniformity masquerading as objectivity, stealth corrections, and narratives.
Narratives on narratives.
People notice when they are being managed rather than informed. And nothing destroys trust faster than the sense that the press is choosing sides.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)