The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).
So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all.
As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better.
Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process.
One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates tons of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else).
So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment."
Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.
Part 1: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Amer... Part 2: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer...
Some thoughts:
The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).
So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all.
As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better.
Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process.
One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates tons of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else).
So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment."
Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.