Ian Patrick, FISM News
With the current political climate, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the most trusted name in news among major media organizations deals almost exclusively with a mostly non-political topic: the weather.
According to YouGov’s Trust in Media 2023 poll, Americans seem to mostly agree that The Weather Channel is the most trustworthy major news outlet in the market.
The poll was conducted by asking Americans whether they trust, distrust, or have no opinion on a list of 56 media organizations. The data was compiled and presented by net trust score, which represents “how much more likely Americans are to say the outlet is trustworthy … than untrustworthy.”
A writeup on the poll states that The Weather Channel was “the only outlet that YouGov asked about that more Democrats (+64) and Republicans (+47) trust than the shares who distrust it.”
Following The Weather Channel in trustworthiness is the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) at +30 points and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) at +29 points.
There were four media organizations at the bottom of this list which listed negative points. These organizations are Daily Kos (-1), Breitbart News (-3), The Daily Caller (-4), and Alex Jones’s Infowars (-16).
The poll shows that there were “very few news organizations that are considered trustworthy by sizable proportions of both Democrats and Republicans.”
Democrats often placed a higher amount of trust in most news sources than Republicans. In fact, only four organizations had a negative net trustworthiness rating among the left: One America News (OAN), Fox News, Breitbart News, and Infowars.
On the other hand, Republicans were generally more skeptical of placing any amount of trust in any news network. Aside from The Weather Channel, the highest net positive trustworthiness rating was given to Fox News (+41).
As for the organization which saw the widest range of political disagreement, CNN takes the cake. The writeup says the data shows “a 92-point difference between Democrats’ net trust (+55) and Republicans’ net trust (-37) in CNN.”
In addition to these findings, the YouGov survey also looked at how news trustworthiness is perceived on various social media sites. All but two social media outlets had negative net trustworthiness, those being LinkedIn (+3) and YouTube (+1).
According to the writeup:
In addition to asking about traditional media outlets, YouGov also asked about the news that is shared on 11 different social media platforms. Americans generally have a net negative view of the trustworthiness of news shared on prominent social media platforms, with TikTok (-36), Snapchat (-26), and Facebook (-22) earning the lowest net trust scores.