Why It Matters that People Distrust the Media

This is a second guest post from Jonathan Ladd.  His first post is here.


Yesterday, I discussed causes if media distrust. Now, I would like to focus on the consequences.  A variety of evidence suggests that those who distrust the media are more resistant to new messages about the state of the country, instead relying on their prior beliefs and partisanship to form their current perceptions.  In my book, I present evidence from panel data and an experiment to get leverage on the direction of causation. The bottom line is that it isn’t simply that having rigid and partisan beliefs (or other correlated attributes) causes one to distrust the media. There is also substantial causation flowing in the other direction. Distrusting the media causes people to hold less responsive and more partisan beliefs.


The first three figures below present economic perceptions in the 2004 American National Election Study. Perceptions of the overall economy, unemployment and inflation over the past year are broken down by party identification and trust in the media. In each case, beliefs about the last year of George W. Bush’s first term are more driven by partisanship when people distrust the media.

In another example, the 2000 American National Election Study asked people how various national conditions had changed over the 8 years that Bill Clinton was president. As one might expect, Democrats thought change in these areas was more positive than Republicans did. But in every area except the crime rate, partisanship’s influence on perceptions was greater when people distrusted the media.

In my next (and final) post in this series, I will discuss the relationship of media distrust to partisan self-selection of media outlets.

2 Responses to Why It Matters that People Distrust the Media

  1. RobC April 26, 2012 at 5:03 pm #

    I thought pretty much the most fundamental lesson in a liberal education is to approach everything with healthy skepticism–and I don’t mean only generally, but very specifically. When I read an article, brief or essay, whether in the media or law or academia, my skepticism is active for every sentence. Is that true? What’s the authority for that? Does that logically follow from the predicate?

    If that kind of skepticism and willingness to challenge the veracity of what is written is what is meant by distrust, then I plead guilty. Perhaps, however, distrust is the product of having one’s skepticism too often be proven to be well-founded. If so, I’m guilty again.

    A professor I knew gave a speech in the sixties entitled, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” He defended it by saying it was peripheral to his real message, which was, “Don’t trust anyone.” That was facetious, but the general idea seems to me pretty smart. We shouldn’t trust the media, or the government, or business, or community organizers, or religion, or our “betters,” too much. The sign Melville puts over the barber’s door in The Confidence Man says it well: “NO TRUST.”

  2. http://maruta.be/aihgaw/3 July 12, 2013 at 3:09 pm #

    Why It Matters that People Distrust the Media — The Monkey Cage