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American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy
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This survey report is tangentially relevant to AI safety discussions around information ecosystems, disinformation, and how algorithmic amplification contributes to political polarization and erosion of epistemic commons—issues that intersect with AI deployment and governance concerns.
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Importance: 32/100organizational reportdataset
Summary
A Knight Foundation and Gallup survey examining American attitudes toward media trust, democracy, and information consumption in 2020. The report documents widespread distrust in media institutions, partisan divides in news consumption, and concerns about misinformation's effect on democratic health. It provides empirical data on how filter bubbles and polarization shape public perception of news reliability.
Key Points
- •Majority of Americans believe the media is critical to democracy but express significant distrust in mainstream news outlets.
- •Strong partisan divide exists in media trust, with Republicans far more distrustful of national media than Democrats.
- •Concerns about misinformation and biased reporting are near-universal across political affiliations, though attributed to different sources.
- •Social media is viewed as both a democratizing information tool and a major vector for spreading false or misleading content.
- •Americans desire factual, unbiased reporting but disagree sharply on which outlets actually provide it.
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American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy – Knight Foundation
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American Views 2020 Trust Media and Democracy
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Overview
Update: On Nov. 9, 2020, Gallup updated the report “ American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy ,” to correct a methodological error. The changes do not alter the underlying integrity of the data nor the conclusions. However, specific numbers have changed for a range of results. Learn more .
There is a widening gulf between American aspirations for and assessments of the news media. With each passing benchmark study, the American people render deeper and increasingly polarized judgments about the news media and how well it is fulfilling its role in our democracy.
In 2018, Gallup and Knight Foundation published the inaugural American Views report as part of their Trust, Media and Democracy research program. This landmark study of Americans’ attitudes toward the news media and its role in our democracy is part of the ongoing Gallup/Knight research effort. The 2018 report found that while Americans valued the role of the news media as an important institution in a free society, they did not believe it was fulfilling its democratic roles well. Political party was the primary determining factor driving Americans’ opinions of and trust in the media.
For the 2020 American Views survey, Gallup and Knight polled more than 20,000 U.S. adults and found continued pessimism and further partisan entrenchment about how the news media delivers on its democratic mandate for factual, trustworthy information. Many Americans feel the media’s critical roles of informing and holding those in power accountable are compromised by increasing bias. As such, Americans have not only lost confidence in the ideal of an objective media, they believe news organizations actively support the partisan divide. At the same time, Americans have not lost sight of the value of news — strong majorities uphold the ideal that the news media is fundamental to a healthy democracy.
Gallup and Knight publish these sobering findings at a moment when America’s media landscape is increasingly shaped by the financial exigencies of the attention economy — and when journalism, like other democratic institutions, is growing more vulnerable to polarization and eroding trust.
As evidenced in this study, party affiliation remains the key predictor of attitudes about the news media. Republicans express more negative sentiments on every aspect of media performance compared to Democrats and independents. Attitudes also differ by age — likely a reflection, in part, of generational differences in news consumption, as this study documents a concerning negative trend in young Americans’ opinions o
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