Americans Think Media is Less Shady Than Last Year

Big news for the media industry: the public kind of, sort of, trusts them again. At least more than the did last year.

Thanks guys.

After hitting an all time low in 2012, Americans are placing a little more trust in mass media this year. That's huge news, since confidence in media outlets has been deteriorating since 2007.

So why the shift? According to Gallup, it's probably thanks to a bump from Republicans and Independents. During the 2012 presidential elections non-liberals expressed a huge level of distrust in the media, who they accused of treating Republican candidate Mitt Romney unfairly. With that drama over, Republicans and Independents aren't feeling quite as angry towards news outlets.

Overall, 44 percent of Americans say that they place a lot of trust in the media. When you break that down by political party, the numbers are way skewed. Sixty percent of Democrats feel like the mass media is trustworthy. When it comes to independents, that number drops to around 37 percent. And Republicans? Thirty-three percent feel like they'd place a great deal of trust in media outlets. But that's up from 26 percent last year. Hooray?

The numbers jibe with the belief held by most in the U.S. that the media leans liberal. About 46 percent of Americans said that media is "too liberal," while only 13 percent considered organizations to be "too conservative." Around 37 percent of people thought that the media's representation of issues was "just about right."

Even though it's an improvement, in the grand scheme of things, trust in the media kind of stinks. It used to be much higher in the 1990s and early 2000s, when by and large Americans felt like the news media was a good source of impartial information.