Why Don’t Americans Trust the News?

A trusted press is essential to a thriving democracy, but recent studies show that Americans’ confidence in news media has hit record lows — regardless of factors like geography and political affiliation. To blame are growing perceptions of bias and a sense that news reporting that doesn’t feel applicable to everyday life. We look at why so few people trust the media — and what could be done to change that.

Guests:

• Madeleine Bair, journalist, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano
• John Biewen, Scene on Radio producer and host, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. I am in today for Mina Kim.

And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently, reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. People tell me all the time they can’t listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment.

So what does that all mean? What has journalism gotten wrong? And where do we go from here?

We are joined by John Biewen. He is host of Scene on Radio. It’s a podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated Americans’ news and information crisis.

We’re also joined by Madeleine Bair. She’s founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s a publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.

Welcome to you both.

John Biewen: Thank you. Good to be here.

Lesley McClurg: John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it?

John Biewen: Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It’s multifaceted.

One is, you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, that’s a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don’t think most people have really grasped it.

When my co-host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I launched this latest season of Scene on Radio, which we simply call The News, I wasn’t aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis: that we’ve lost three-quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It’s absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for democracy that we could talk more about. So that’s one facet.

The other certainly is trust. You mentioned Gallup. In 2025, they found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and many facets to it that we discuss.

And then there’s this general sense that there are a gazillion sources all saying very different things, so we don’t have a shared narrative in this country. And when you’re trying to run a democracy, that’s another kind of crisis.

Lesley McClurg: For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don’t have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the Border Belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you paint us a picture of this community?

John Biewen: Yeah. So this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties where I spent time talking to a range of people.

These are counties that are historically, and still relatively, low income. They’re very, very diverse, with large white, Black, and Indigenous populations. It’s a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two or three decades.

It’s also a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, quite recently, to very solidly red, really just in the age of Trump, which is really interesting and kind of surprising.

So, yeah, we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media.

The other really, really important thing to say about the Border Belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what’s going on in their communities.

Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have had a handful of reporters covering the city council, the school board, local business, and things like that up until 10 or 20 years ago. Now they’ve been bought by chains, and the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing reporting on high school sports and a couple of features. They no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what’s going on in local government.

So there’s a sense of just not being able to get information about what’s going on in the community.

Lesley McClurg: And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, the news media in general? What’s the relationship now, given that there aren’t local reporters on the ground? What do they think of, like, The New York Times, et cetera?

John Biewen: Yeah, I think if you ask, this won’t surprise you. We talked to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and other right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media — the mainstream media, TV networks, the national papers, and so on — are biased.

Particularly, they would say they are very anti-Trump, and that impression causes folks to sort of tune it out.

One of the effects is that if you don’t have a local news source telling you what’s going on in your own community, you’re probably filling the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station with national news sources that you already pay attention to — or, frankly, more likely, social media and things like that, which are even more polarized and feed you the things you already think are true. There have been studies showing that this actually exacerbates polarization.

Lesley McClurg: Did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung from Democratic to more Trumpian? What sort of led or pushed them toward the right?

John Biewen: Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about attributing it to a single thing. I think there’s a combination of factors.

There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing. Since the Democrats were in charge at that time, a lot of the frustration landed there.

But to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about, and the sense that we’ve had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservatives endlessly shouting that you shouldn’t trust the mainstream news media because they are left-wing or left-leaning.

That has taken on an even sharper, more incessant tone under Trump, where you have a president who, for much of the last 10 years, has dominated the public discourse and casually calls the news “fake news.” I think that has given people a kind of license to simply write off things in the news that they would rather not hear.

Lesley McClurg: Madeleine, your reporting focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press and to the news media?

Madeleine Bair: Yeah. So before really starting El Tímpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening — sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland to ask them, “What do you want to see in local media? What do you want to change in local media?”

The biggest comment that we heard was simply, más información. People wanted more information.

When I was listening to John’s podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn’t that different. People had seen their local news decline.

For Spanish speakers here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that there are nearly two million Bay Area residents who speak Spanish at home, there are so few sources of news and information serving that community.

Immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo. There are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those outlets are covering a nine-plus-county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half hour each day. There’s only so much local reporting they can do that’s relevant to people’s lives in different corners of the Bay Area.

People told us they wanted more information, more local information, more information that’s relevant to their daily lives. They also said, “I want actionable information.”

One of the other biggest pieces of feedback that we heard about existing Spanish-language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action.

We led this listening process during the first Trump administration, and so many people told us, “I just avoid the news because it leaves me in a panic.”

So the news was, in some ways, harmful to their own mental health.

Lesley McClurg: And how do they feel their communities are profiled or presented to the world through the media?

Madeleine Bair: Essentially as victims — very much so.

I recall one conversation that I had with a community organizer who was a leader in an organization of immigrant women in the East Bay. She told me that, previous to that job, she had worked as a lawyer and would oftentimes get calls from reporters asking to interview her for her expertise.

Yet in this role, working as a community organizer for an organization made up of immigrant women, reporters called her looking for profiles of people who were victims.

I think that’s how she personally experienced the media, and I think it’s how a lot of community members see themselves reflected in the media.

Lesley McClurg: We’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. We’re joined by John Biewen, host of Scene on Radio. That’s a podcast out of Duke University that recently investigated our news and information crisis.

And you just heard Madeleine Bair, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano.

We’ll be right back after this break. I’m Lesley McClurg. Stay with us.

You’re listening to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim, and we’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. This is across political parties.

We are joined by John Biewen. He’s host of Scene on Radio. That’s a podcast about America’s news and information crisis.

And Madeleine Bair, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s the publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.

We would love to hear from you. Do you trust us? Why or why not? Can you remember when you potentially started to lose confidence in the media? Do you want more local news? Why or why not?

You can email your comments and questions to [email protected], or you can find us on any of the social channels — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram. We’re @KQEDForum. Or you can jump on the phone now and give us a call at 866-733-6786.