Which brings us to the bad news. The media outlet that has the most robustly positive perception among the American public is the one that is most explicitly and structurally apolitical: the Weather Channel. On pretty much everything else, the pattern is heavily saturated with partisanship — like most other things in America.
According to the new data, the Weather Channel is viewed with more trust than distrust by a 53-point margin among Americans. The next most-trusted outlet on net is PBS, which has a 30-point advantage on trustworthiness. But less than half of respondents overall said they found PBS trustworthy or very trustworthy.
Partisanship also comes into play with PBS. The Weather Channel is trusted by most Democrats and most Republicans. But PBS is viewed as trustworthy by two-thirds of Democrats and only one-third of Republicans. Why? Oklahoma offers some indications: There, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) has attacked PBS for “overly sexualiz[ing] or indoctrinat[ing] children” — his office citing the fact that the show “Clifford the Big Red Dog” showed a lesbian couple as evidence of this effect.
PBS is tied with ABC News for second as the most-trusted outlet by Democrats. Among Republicans, second-place goes to Fox News, followed by the further-right cable channel Newsmax.
There’s a pattern that emerges from the data. Democrats are more likely to express trust in media outlets in general, with the party’s median level of trust at of 46 percent. (In other words, half of the outlets polled by YouGov come in above 46 percent among Democrats and half below.) Among Republicans, trust is lower; the median is 24 percent.
If we compare the views of members of the two parties (after adjusting for the extent to which people had any opinion of the outlet), the pattern looks like the chart below. Anything above the diagonal line is an outlet more trusted by Republicans and the further above the line, the bigger the partisan gap. Anything below the line is more trusted by Democrats. (The value for each outlet is located at the center of its name.)
You can see that big blob of outlets in the lower right. That reflects the medians expressed above: Democrats view more outlets with trust than Republicans, so those outlets land in that section of the graph.
A few outlets are highlighted. Infowars is interesting: a fringe-right purveyor of baseless conspiracy theories, Democrats view it with slightly more trust overall (20 percent to 15 percent) almost certainly because Democrats give nearly everything higher trust scores. If we adjust for how familiar people are with Infowars, the two parties are about equally skeptical.
Compare that to One America News, a slightly less egregious purveyor of false information that is more squarely partisan than Infowars. It’s above the diagonal, a bit under the Fox News mark.
We can look at the data a different way. We can roughly account for the partisan lean toward media (Democratic trust, Republican distrust) by comparing each outlet’s trustworthiness score to the partisan median. So Fox News is below the median for Democrats and well above the median for Republicans, landing it in the top-left box below.
The most interesting outlets are those in the top-right and bottom-left boxes. Those are the outlets which are viewed with above-median trust by both parties or below-median trust, respectively. So we see that the Weather Channel is in the upper-right box (above the diagonal, since it’s further above the Republican median trust score than it is above the higher Democratic median trust score). Infowars is squarely in the lower-right.
(The Washington Post, I will note, is also in that upper-right box.)
What’s interesting about viewing the values this way is that the partisan nature of the upper-left box becomes apparent. All of its members are explicitly right-wing, and some distance from the diagonal. In the lower-right box are outlets that are often tagged as left-wing, like NPR, or explicitly left-wing, like MSNBC. But (in part because the Democratic median is higher) they remain closer to that diagonal dividing line.
The upshot of all of this is what it was at the beginning. Republicans distrust most media and give more trust to explicitly partisan outlets. Democrats trust media more broadly. And everyone can agree that the Weather Channel’s presentations are trustworthy.
At least until hurricanes start going woke.
