Losing faith in the news

Confidence in the accuracy of the media is at a two-decade low, according the the Pew Research Center.

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate. In the initial survey in this series about the news media's performance in 1985, 55% said news stories were accurate while 34% said they were inaccurate. That percentage had fallen sharply by the late 1990s and has remained low over the last decade.

The impact of diminishing variety in coverage that comes with so many mergers and acquisitions of media properties is never addressed by the study, but many groups like Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting suggest that the two are closely intertwined.