Fifteen years ago today, November 4, 2008, American voters elected liberal Democratic Senator Barack Obama to the Presidency. It was a campaign in which the public recognized the media elite’s tremendous favoritism towards Obama, and even many reporters admitted the coverage had been slanted against the Republicans.

Tilting the news in favor of their preferred candidate may have been a show of the media’s power, but it also accelerated the decline in public trust that journalists once enjoyed. In 2003, more than half of all Americans (54%) told Gallup they had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media, vastly more than the 16 percent who said they had “none at all.”

Five years later, after the spectacle of reporters’ brazenly one-sided coverage of a presidential election, only 43 percent said they had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media — an 11-point drop — while those who had no trust at all had risen to 21 percent. This year, that same poll showed a complete collapse in media trust: more said they had no trust at all (39%) vs. the 32 percent who still professed a “great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust.

[Gosh. If only something had changed…for the better. ~ Beege]