U.S. public trust in mass media hit a record low of 28% in 2025, with a 20-point partisan trust gap paralyzing newsrooms

Gallup polling from September-October 2025 found that Americans' trust in mass media to report news fully, accurately, and fairly hit a historic low of 28%, the third consecutive year below 40%. The partisan divide is extreme: 53% of Republicans find mainstream news 'not at all trustworthy' compared to just 7% of Democrats. Trust in national news organizations dropped 11 percentage points in a single year (from 67% to 56%) and 20 points since 2016. Even local news trust, historically a bright spot, fell from 82% in 2016 to 70% in 2025. Why it matters: when a majority of the public distrusts news media, factual reporting is dismissed as partisan bias, so shared understanding of basic facts (election results, public health data, climate science) fractures along partisan lines, so policy debates cannot proceed from a common factual foundation, so democratic compromise becomes structurally impossible because opposing sides literally disagree on what is true, so society loses the ability to collectively respond to crises that require coordinated action. The structural root cause is that decades of partisan media criticism (from both left and right), the rise of algorithmically curated social media that rewards outrage over accuracy, genuine editorial failures that undermined credibility, and the economic incentive for partisan outlets to frame mainstream media as the enemy have created a self-reinforcing cycle where distrust drives audiences to partisan sources which further deepens distrust.