David “should have a regular NYT column” Weakliem writes:

The Columbia Journalism Review recently published a long article by Jeff Gerth on media coverage of Donald Trump. In the introductory section, Gerth says: “Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer….Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.”

Weakliem continues:

Confidence in the media has been in general decline for decades, according to the data I’ve seen, so the first sentence surprised me.

Indeed. That claim surprised me too! It turns out it’s not true.

I have three interests in this story:

1. As a political scientist who studies American public opinion, I’m interested in examples where journalists get things way off. Mistakes of reporting can be important in themselves and also can reveal deeper misunderstandings.

2. As a statistician, I’m interested in how people get confused by data.

3. As a Columbia professor, I’m interested in what’s happening with the Columbia journalism review.

I’ll share Weakliem’s story and then go through those three issues.

0. The story

Weakliem takes a look:

I checked the Edelman Trust Barometer and noticed that they have continued to survey trust, so you can look at how trust has changed since 2016. The following figure shows trust in the media in 2016 and 2023 for nations in which both are available:

Trust in the media fell from 47% to 43% in the United States over the period. Among all 25 nations in the sample, average trust fell from 49.3% to 46.9%. So the US was a little below average at both times. As far as change, the United States had a decline of 4%, which was not unusual—the mean change was a decline of 2.4%. As far as the “positive trend” in 2016, the report says that trust in the media was higher than it had been in 2015. The Edelman Trust Barometer apparently goes back to 2001, but there doesn’t seem to be a convenient place to look up the data, so I didn’t pursue that. The main point is that it doesn’t suggest that the American media suffered a particularly large decline in trust after 2016.

What about that 26% claim? Weakliem checks it out:

Now for the Reuters study (the Digital News Report): the United States did rank lowest, at 26%. The Reuters data go back to 2016, so they can also be used to measure change. A figure showing trust in 2016 (or the earliest year available) and 2022:

The Uni