The Media We Trust

The most trusted news organization, and the only newspaper in the top five, was The Wall Street Journal with 57.7% of Americans trusting them, Simmons Research found.

Also performing well were the major television network news organizations, with ABC (55.9%), CBS (55.4%), and NBC (54.1%) ranking as the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th most trusted sources. Forbes was the most trusted magazine and rounded out the top five, trusted by 54.2% of Americans.

News Media Trust Index (Top 20 of 38)

Rank News Organization % of Americans who trust
this news organization
1   The Wall Street Journal 57.7%
2   ABC News 55.9%
3   CBS News 55.4%
4   BBC News 55.2%
5   Forbes 54.2%
6   NBC News 54.1%
7   The New York Times 53.8%
8   The Washington Post 53.6%
9   USA Today 51.1%
10   The Washington Times 50.0%
11   MSNBC 47.4%
12   Reuters 46.6%
13   Bloomberg 46.3%
14   CNN 46.1%
15   NPR 45.1%
16   Chicago Tribune 44.8%
17   Fox News 44.7%
18   The Economist 44.7%
19   LA Times 42.9%
20   Huffington Post 38.4%

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 was fourth behind BBC News, MSNBC (47.4%), and Bloomberg (46.3%). Fox News came in 17th place, with just 44.7% of Americans trusting them.

The least trusted news sources were all Internet-first and hyper-partisan in nature (both liberal and conservative) 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.

Thirteen percent of Americans found none of these news sources to be trustworthy. This segment of consumers, identified by Simmons as “doubters” seem to think all news is fake news. Interestingly, this group, while they were less likely to vote overall, voted heavily for Donald Trump (62.2% Trump v. 27.8% Clinton).

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