Americans’ trust in the mass media to present informative content and uphold journalistic integrity has fallen considerably during the lifetime of DGN students. According to analytics and advisory company Gallup, Inc., 45 percent of Americans surveyed reported a “Great Deal/Fair Amount” in trust towards mainstream news media in 2009. In 2025, this number is now 28 percent. Gallup’s statisitc has been falling since the 2000s.
“Information is distorted by the creation of media,” junior Kevin Hebreard said. “Broadcasters want to cover things that will get more attention, not necessarily things that are more important. News just needs to cover things that are more popular in order to advance their publication.”
In 2005, there were 8,891 newspapers operating in the U.S. Today, there are less than 6,000. Despite this, tens of millions of news articles are published online daily, and roughly 60,000 of these are AI-generated, according to a May 2025 study by Five Percent. Because there are now fewer outlets trying to maximize content quantity, some fear journalistic objectives are being left behind.
“When I first started teaching, smartphones didn’t exist. There was an internet, but kids didn’t have as much access to content, so they weren’t so embroiled in it,” English teacher Farrah Velazquez said. “There weren’t other things distracting them, so they were taking the time to know what those things are. I think I feel like fewer kids now know who’s who and what’s going on.”
Gallup’s “‘Great deal’ of trust in mass media” statistic was at an all-time high of 72% in 1972. At this time, three broadcasters held 95 percent of television news viewership. That same year, Richard Nixon secured 97 percent of the electoral college’s vote for presidential re-election.
“It used to be, even before we had cable, you had ABC, CBS, and NBC News,” social studies teacher Karen Spahr-Thomas said. You would have dinner with your family and then go watch the news. Water Cronkite was the big news man of CBS, and everybody would watch it. Now, I think less and less people actually sit down to watch the news.”
Now that networks like Fox and NBC have made their primary entertainment channels separate from their news networks, they have to fill hours of their daily broadcast schedule with opinion content. This, combined with the rise of web-based news programs like “The Daily Wire” which have more journalistic freedoms, has contributed to reduced trust in individual media narratives.
“To be completely informed, in my opinion, you have to go to many sources. There is not a one-stop-shop for any event, and that’s why I teach this to the students, where I’m looking at different news sources,” Spahr-Thomas said. “And what I try to ask is, ‘Well, where did you get that information? How did you hear about it?’ Students sheepishly will say, ‘I first heard about it from TikTok.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s okay. But then where did you go after TikTok?’ And then they say, ‘Well, I went to this source and that source.’ And I said, ‘Good. That’s what we want you to do.’”
For the third quarter of 2025, Fox News led the American cable news sector with 2.483 million total primetime viewers. MSNBC holds a distant second with 802,000, and CNN is third at 538,000. However, these sources are still being questioned by mainstream audiences. According to Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans agree that these broadcasters do an inadequate job of disclosing the sources of their funding.
“This is just the end result of the evolution of technology and the natural result of representative democracy, where government figures are naturally going to want to get involved in the news and the media to try and goad people into having a certain perspective that is in the Overton window rather than something that would be potentially threatening to the status quo,” senior Chase Speir said.
Whether it has been bred by the news or not, it’s no question that the politicization of news and the decentralization of Americans’ views have gone hand in hand. However, this doesn’t always come at the benefit of major partisan interests. Since 2000, the amount of the U.S. voting population that has registered independent has increased by 9%, from 23% to 32% in 2025.
“I hope people are more willing to seek out alternative media, not just because it’s inherently right, but simply because it offers a different perspective,” Speir said. “People are stuck in a very binary system. The way the system has been brought up you only have left or right, Republican or Democrat. I think you have to transcend this dichotomy.”
