It doesn’t seem to matter if President Trump’s favorability ratings are awful among millennials, or if his first 100 days as president haven’t exactly been robust. He’s reportedly still more trusted than the media who covers him on a daily basis.
That’s according to a report in Morning Consult, which notes that 37 percent of people said they trusted Trump to tell the truth while only 29 percent could say the same for the media. Making matters worse for the media in the poll is that 51 percent of Americans said the national political media is “out of touch with everyday Americans” and only 28 percent believe the media understand “the issues everyday Americans are facing.”
Meanwhile, 52 percent of the respondents said they either had little or no trust at all in the media, as “Republicans (67 percent) were almost twice as likely as Democrats (36 percent) to say the media was out of touch with everyday Americans. Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of Republicans also said they trust the White House more to tell the truth, compared with 54 percent of Democrats who backed the media.”
It appears that Trump’s constant tweets about “fake news” have been absorbed by much of the American public. According to the poll, 42 percent said they believed they saw fake news in national papers or news broadcasts at least once a day. Thirty-one percent said they saw it less frequently (ranging from once every couple days to less than once a week).
Still, when Trump has something to say, he oftentimes runs straight to national newspapers, particularly the New York Times, in order to give them exclusive interviews. And as he hits the 100th day of his presidency on Saturday, CNN reports that he’ll have participated in nine interviews between Wednesday and Saturday. Why? Perhaps because he feels he needs the media more than he lets on to his supporters.
“After saying the first 100 days weren’t important, he’s doing a whole lot of interviews all of a sudden to talk about the first 100 days,” CNN anchor John Berman said Friday.
In one of those interviews, Trump admitted this week that being a president is harder than he originally thought. What’s equally as hard for journalists is rebuilding the trust they once had with the people who should be paying attention to them.