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Gallup's October 2025 survey
webCredibility Rating
4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Gallup
Relevant as background context on the epistemic environment in which AI governance debates occur; declining media trust may complicate public reasoning about AI risks and policy responses.
Metadata
Importance: 32/100news articlereference
Summary
A Gallup poll from October 2025 reporting that American public trust in mass media has reached a new historic low. This survey tracks longitudinal trends in media credibility and public confidence in news institutions, with implications for how information — including about AI and emerging technologies — is received and processed by the public.
Key Points
- •Public trust in mass media in the US has fallen to a new record low as of 2025.
- •Declining media trust contributes to epistemic fragmentation, making it harder for accurate information to propagate.
- •Low institutional trust can accelerate susceptibility to disinformation and undermine coordinated societal responses to risks.
- •The trend reflects broader erosion of confidence in information intermediaries, relevant to AI governance and public communication.
- •Epistemic degradation at the population level poses indirect risks to effective AI oversight and informed democratic deliberation.
Cited by 2 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Epistemic Collapse | Risk | 49.0 |
| AI-Driven Trust Decline | Risk | 55.0 |
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Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.
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Politics
Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago .
Meanwhile, seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%).
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When Gallup began measuring trust in the news media in the 1970s, between 68% and 72% of Americans expressed confidence in reporting. However, by the next reading in 1997, public confidence had fallen to 53%. Media trust remained just above 50% until it dropped to 44% in 2004, and it has not risen to the majority level since. The highest reading in the past decade was 45% in 2018 , which came just two years after confidence had collapsed amid the divisive 2016 presidential campaign.
The latest 28% confidence reading, from a Sept. 2-16 poll, marks the first time the measure has fallen below 30%.
Media Trust at Record Lows Among All Party Groups
Although Democrats and Republicans continue to express different levels of trust in the news media, the percentages with high confidence in reporting are at low points among all party groups.
Republicans’ confidence, which hasn’t risen above 21% since 2015, has dropped to single digits (8%) for the first time in the trend.
Independents’ trust has not reached the majority level since 2003, and the latest 27% reading matches last year’s historical low.
For Democrats, the narrowest of majorities (51%) now express trust in the media, which is a repeat of the low previously seen in 2016.
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Media Confidence Remains Higher Among Older Adults
There is a clear generational divide in trust in the media that has grown particularly stark over the past decade, according to an analysis of three-year aggregated data to increase sample sizes. In the most recent three-year period, spanning 2023 to 2025, 43% of adults aged 65 and older trust the media, compared with no more than 28% in any younger age group.
In the early 2000s, Americans in all four age groups expressed relatively similar levels of confidence in the media, at just above 50%. Since then, confidence among all four g
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