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The Least and Most Trusted News Sources in the U.S.

posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 06 2019, @12:29AM   
from the shocking-news dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Maybe it's the accent. When it comes to news, in a world where "fake news" has become an ideological battle cry rather than an oxymoron, Americans deem British media outlets more trustworthy than their U.S. counterparts.

The most trusted news source in the U.S. is the Economist — a venerable weekly magazine published in the U.K. — according, at least, to a recent survey conducted by the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The second most reliable news source, in the view of voluntary survey respondents, is public television (with the Public Broadcasting Service separately ranking sixth among survey respondents), followed by Reuters and BBC. National Public Radio placed just ahead of PBS at No. 5, while the U.K.'s the Guardian clinched the seventh spot. The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News rounded out the 10 most trusted brands. The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp. NWS, +0.49% NWSA, +0.65% , the parent of MarketWatch.

At the other extreme, Occupy Democrats — a political website with a self-professed agenda of counterbalancing the right-wing Tea Party — took the dubious honor of most untrustworthy.

BuzzFeed, Breitbart and Infowars also scored dismally on the trust-o-meter, with a BuzzFeed representative questioning the poll's merit and methods. "This is not a poll of how much trust Americans have in their news outlets. It's an open-ended, methodologically flawed survey of people who happen to fill out a form on the homepage of their local news outlet," said Matt Mittenthal, spokesman for BuzzFeed News. "No one familiar with how polling works would consider this to be reliable or scientific."

Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-most-and-the-least-trusted-news-sources-in-the-us-2017-08-03

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Original Submission

• Fake news Fake news (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @02:19AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @02:19AM (#839473)

  Data were collected in the February and March 2017 using an online survey made available to users (N = 8,728) of the digital media platforms of twenty-eight different newsrooms across the United States. Newsrooms included were Annenberg Media, Ball State Daily News, Casper Star-Tribune, Cincinnati Enquirer, Coloradoan, Columbia Missourian, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Evergrey, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fresno Bee, Jacksboro, Herald-Gazette, Kansas City Star, KUT, Lima News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, NBC, Ogden Standard-Examiner, Rains County Leader, San Angelo Standard-Times, Skagit Publishing, Springfield News-Leader, St. Louis Magazine, St. Louis Public Radio, Steamboat Pilot & Today, USA TODAY, WCPO, and WDET. Participation was strictly voluntary—no compensation was provided. Most newsrooms made reference to the survey on their websites and social media accounts. Some mentioned it in print and on air. For the most part, the survey was made available by newsrooms around the same time. However, the duration and level of participation did vary, as will be addressed below.

  Wow an online survey given to people who read news sites said they trust the sites they read. And I would never fill out such a survey (or likely even be exposed to it in whatever annoying popup they used to "entice" people to take it), so this does not represent me. Really you can say this applies to the subset of the population that clicks on those annoying popups that are appearing everywhere.

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+3
  Insightful=2, Informative=1, Total=3
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		3

• Re:Fake news (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @06:15AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @06:15AM (#840029)

  Looks like a Runaway submission. I much preferred "Runaway Bride" with Julia Roberts.

  Parent