Simmons Research conducted a survey of American adults in order to learn how much Americans at large trust the media, and we are pleased to present the results in this first Simmons News Media Trust Index. We asked respondents to let us know how trustworthy or untrustworthy they found 38 of the largest and most well-known news sources commonly available in the US. News sources included represented a wide variety of mediums, including print, online, radio, and television with many of them ...

Simmons Research conducted a survey of American adults in order to learn how much Americans at large trust the media, and we are pleased to present the results in this first Simmons News Media Trust Index. We asked respondents to let us know how trustworthy or untrustworthy they found 38 of the largest and most well-known news sources commonly available in the US. News sources included represented a wide variety of mediums, including print, online, radio, and television with many of them operating across platforms.

The average percentage of respondents who rated news sources as trustworthy or very trustworthy was just 40.1% - not a ringing endorsement for journalism in general. Topping the list across all news sources, and the only newspaper in the top five, was the Wall Street Journal with 57.7% of Americans trusting them.

The major television network news organizations also fared quite well in our survey, taking the second (ABC 55.9%), third (CBS 55.4%), and sixth (NBC 54.1%) most trusted positions. Among cable news, the most trusted network in the US was ironically not American. BBC News was trusted by 55.2% of Americans and was the fourth most trusted news source. CNN, which touts itself as the “most trusted name in news,” trailed the list at number 14 with the trust of 46.1% of Americans. Forbes was the most trusted magazine and rounded out the top five, trusted by 54.2% of Americans. The New York Times and the Washington Post were both among the most trusted news organizations in our survey. The New York Times came in at the seventh position trusted by 53.8% of Americans, and the Washington Post in eighth trusted by 53.6%. USA Today (51.1%) and the Washington Times (50.0%) were the final two sources trusted by at least a majority of Americans.

The least trusted news sources were all Internet-first and hyper-partisan in nature representing brands that have been consistently rated as misleading and inaccurate by fact-checkers. The six organizations trusted least were split evenly between far-left and far-right news sources, and on average were trusted by only about one in four Americans. Daily Caller was the bottom of our list, with just 22.5% trusting them. They were followed by another extremely conservative platform, InfoWars, at 24.3% which was recently banned or had content deleted from Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify for violating terms of service around hate speech, harassment, and bullying.

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