There is little doubt that the media is one of the least trusted institutions in Republican circles.
In the past two decades, confidence in traditional media has plummeted – especially among Republicans. According to a Gallup poll, at least since the late 1990s, Republicans are less likely than Democrats (and independents) to say they trust the media. But as of 2015, confidence among Republicans plummeted, dropping from 32% to 10% in 2020. (Meanwhile, among Democrats, confidence in the media has gone up again, and quite a bit.)
Part of this is because Republicans tend to be more expressive in their criticism of the media and have long perceived it as having a liberal bias. But now they are also more likely to say that being “anti-media” is part of their political identity, and that is probably creating the huge gap in the confidence of the media that we are seeing.
Let’s start with the media habits of the Republicans. In our fragmented media ecosystem, it is not uncommon for Republicans and Democrats to look for news sources that reinforce their political beliefs. And, as a new study found, exposure to party media – whether liberal or conservative – reduces people’s general confidence in the mainstream media, regardless of the political party. But what sets Republicans apart on this point is their constant reliance on only one source for all their news: Fox News.
In its study of the media landscape before the 2020 presidential election cycle, the Pew Research Center found that of the 30 news sources it asked about, only Fox News was trusted by the majority of Republicans. (The Republicans’ second most reliable source, ABC News, is nowhere near: 33% said they trusted ABC News for political and electoral news, compared with 65% who trusted Fox News.) This finding contrasts sharply with opinions from Democrats, who said they trusted a variety of news sources, and this marks an even greater decline in Republicans’ confidence in other news sources since the last time Pew conducted a similar poll in 2014.
This is partly because animosity towards the other party is on the rise and Republicans are increasingly associating the media with the Democratic Party. This means that they are more likely to reject a source other than Fox News (or One America News Network or Newsmax) as politically biased. For example, in a January YouGov / American Enterprise Institute poll of people who said they voted for then President Trump in 2020, a staggering 92% strongly agreed that “the mainstream media today is just a part of the Democratic Party”.
This distrust and the growing animosity of Republicans towards the media is significant because they are already consumers of isolated news. And studies have shown that when news consumers exist in a media bubble, they can be hostile to news that doesn’t match their political beliefs. (It also means that they can rely too much on their favorite news outlets.) In addition, as Jonathan Ladd, professor of public policy and government at Georgetown University and author of “Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, ” points, Republicans are getting the message from Fox News (and the wider conservative media ecosystem) that the mainstream media cannot be trusted. “This is not new,” said Ladd, but added that the conservative media’s continued criticism of the press was “accelerated” by the modern Republican Party.
See what happened in the Trump era. During his campaign for the presidency and his four years in office, Trump openly attacked the media, calling journalists or news organizations that criticized him or his administration “fake news.” As a result, their supporters’ existing perceptions of media bias and distrust of news organizations have intensified – this was especially true among their white supporters, who are more likely to consume exclusively conservative media. For example, at many events in the Trump campaign, his supporters would discredit, attack and threaten the press. And now, when Trump supporters disagree with a fact, they can report it as “fake news” – be it the size of the crowd or the results of the elections.
Hostility and distrust of the media, in other words, have become a point of political identity among Republicans. We see this especially in the way that people talk about online politics. Consider, for example, a recent study of tweets that mention “fake news”. Over the course of 15 months, study authors Jianing Li and Min-Hsin Su, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found an increase in the number of tweets that used the words “we” or “our” and “they” or “theirs” “in conjunction with the phrase” fake news “. Essentially, the researchers concluded that online discussions about “fake news” were a way for conservatives to create a sense of belonging to the group (“This is the worst kind of fake news possible. We have to stop that kind of thing”) by while establishing a shared enemy (“Fake News Media is a hate group. They hate President Trump”). The use of pronouns that signify belonging to the group (such as “we”) and opposition to the group (such as “they”) are useful on social media platforms, such as Twitter, where users interact with strangers. Even if users don’t know each other personally, they are still trying to cultivate a community, which is certainly true for users who tweet about politics.
Another study that looked at media confidence at the University of California at Berkeley by political scientists Taeku Lee and Christian Hosam found that this attitude, regardless of partisanship, helped to predict a range of political views, such as supporting a path to citizenship and affirmative action. But, arguably, what has had the most consequences is that over time (from 2016 to 2019), the role of media mistrust in shaping opinion has changed in such a way that individuals who mistrust the media have consolidated themselves more consistently in around Trump. Essentially, this distrust of the media now operates “as a basis for Americans to classify themselves into political tribes,” according to Lee. And, as his study suggests, “false news” functions as a “whip”, or a form of Trump supporters ideologically distinguish themselves from other Republicans. It is possible that “a new form of conservatism is taking shape, with the distrust of the media being one of its biggest factors,” Hosam told me.
So why is being anti-media so important to Republican identity? It is no coincidence that, in a scenario of growing party animosity, Republicans’ distrust of the media is increasing as they suspect it is biasing Democrats. But it is also more than that. As Hosam explains, “what Trump does is to connect this type of opposition to the media in a form of conservatism that just didn’t exist before.” And a by-product of this is that the media’s distrust is more central to the conservative group’s identity than it was before Trump. Or, as Lee said, signaling the media’s distrust is “the same as wearing a red MAGA cap.”
As a researcher, Hosam admits that this can make the study of distrust in the media a complicated issue, since distrust has shifted from an attitude about the institution itself to a credential of conservatism. “Now it’s even more difficult to know what people really mean when they talk about the media … what the media’s diet and trust in the media are really telling us.” And, for many Republicans, this may mean that distrust of the media is best thought of as a way of understanding the centrality of their partisanship to their identity.