Gallup released the results of a new poll today showing that Americans’ faith in the media, both newspapers and television news, is at a record low point.

Americans’ confidence in two facets of the news media — newspapers and television news — has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year…

A majority of Americans have expressed confidence in newspapers only once — in 1979, when 51% did. But there is a wide margin between that and the second-highest readings of 39% in 1973 and 1990. The trend average for newspapers is 30%, well above the latest reading of 16%, which is the first time the measure has fallen below 20%. The percentage of Americans who say they have “very little” or volunteer that they have no confidence is currently the highest on record, at 46%.

Confidence in television news has never been higher than its initial 46% reading in 1993 and has averaged 27%, considerably higher than the current 11%. This is the fourth consecutive year that confidence in TV news is below 20%. And for just the second time in the trend, a majority of Americans, 53%, now say they have very little or no confidence at all in TV news.

There is of course a big partisan divide in who trusts the news. Here are the charts, first for trust in newspapers:

And for trust in television news (not the x-axis is different here so the graphs don’t match up):

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a profession which is about 90% constituted of left-leaning people is less trusted by Republicans and more trusted by Democrats. In fact, you may notice that both newspapers and television news got a big boost in confidence from Democrats starting in 2017 when Trump took office. Naturally, if you spend every day telling people what they want to hear, you’re going to be deemed to be doing a good job by those people.

I still think this clip below was one of the journalism highlights of the past several years. It’s former anchor Ted Koppel telling CNN’s Brian Stelter, “You can’t do without Donald Trump. You would be lost without Donald Trump.” He added, “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump.” He went on to take a shot at MSNBC as well.

And of course, Koppel was proven right. A year after BIden’s election, cable news ratings were down sharply:

MSNBC last month didn’t even crack an average of one million total viewers. It averaged only 680,000 — a decline of 54%. As for the 25-54 demographic, MSNBC averaged a measly 78,000, marking a decline of 68% from this time last year.

At CNN, things are far worse. It averaged only 487,000 total viewers last month, down 65% from October 2020. YouTubers operating out of their basements have better numbers than that. Talk show hosts, including Joe Rogan, whom CNN slandered this year, regularly pull in stronger numbers than this. In the 25-54 demographic, CNN logged an average last month of only 101,000, which marks a decline of a whopping 72%.

If you’re a CNN or MSNBC executive, you must be thinking of ways to turn these numbers around. True, at this time last year, there was a presidential election. There’s bound to be a slump the following year. But a slump of 54% and 65%?

The national media will occasionally acknowledge that their complete lack of ideological balance is a problem but it’s never enough of a problem for them to do much of anything about it. They’ll keep hiring the same progressive journalism grads and dismissing the roughly half of the country that doesn’t agree with them despite the evidence that the result is almost no one, not even their core audience, believes them anymore.