A growing number of Americans view the news media as biased even as majorities continue to believe that an independent press is essential to a functional democracy.
A major trust-in-media poll of 20,000 Americans by Gallup and The Knight Foundation found that 86 percent of the people surveyed in December 2019 believed that the media is biased, up from 62 percent in 2007.
“Most Americans have lost confidence in the media to deliver the news objectively,” Sam Gill, Knight’s senior vice president at The Knight Foundation, said in a statement. “This is corrosive for our democracy.”
As in other surveys on the media, the poll found a broad partisan gap in the perception of media bias. Republicans were more than twice as likely (72 percent) than Democrats (28 percent) to believe there is a “great deal” of bias in news coverage.
But the view that there is a significant bias cuts across party lines with 79 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of Independents and 94 percent of Republicans saying there is either “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of media bias. Overall, half of Americans believe the media is very biased.
Amid the concerns about bias, the majority of Americans (84 percent) still believe that it is either “critical” (49 percent) or “very important” for the news media to report news accurately and provide a check on government, corporations, and other seats of power.
Republicans’ concern about media bias is likely the result of overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Trump presidency. Between the beginning of the impeachment proceedings last year and the exoneration vote in February this year, ABC, CBS, and NBC dedicated 77 times more coverage to impeachment, in terms of time spent, than to President Donald Trump’s economic successes, according to a study by the Media Research Center. The coverage was 93 percent negative when it came to Trump, another study found. The results were in line with MRC’s earlier reviews of coverage in 2017 and 2018, which found that the media was 90 percent negative when covering Trump. The Washington Post had over 25 times more negative than positive headlines on Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/86-percent-of-americans-believe-news-media-is-biased-major-poll-finds_3460707.html