[caption id=”attachment_122488″ align=”aligncenter” width=”1024″]FILE – In this March 1, 2013, file photo President Barack Obama speaks to reporters in the White House press briefing room in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
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That headline is not a crack at CNN. The network’s slogan is just fitting in light of a new poll from Quinnipiac about the public’s faith in TV news. Network by major network, viewers’ trust is pretty uniform: only a handful of respondents have “a great deal” of it for each channel, a significant plurality has some, and 30 to 40 percent have little to none. For a business in which personalities and programs are constantly trying to prove themselves more credible than their competitors on other networks, there’s hardly any differentiation among ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, and FOX News and MSNBC have predictable results by party ID.
Look at how stable the numbers are across the “Big Three,” for example, taking into account the recent hit to the reputation of NBC News’ Brian Williams:
The trust in ABC and CBS News is nearly identical across party, gender and age breakdowns.
The story is pretty much the same for CNN, though a few of those surveyed, especially in the 18 to 34 demographic, are more strongly trustworthy of the channel than they are kinda-sorta trustworthy.
FOX News and MSNBC have nearly equal levels of trust, though they unsurprisingly deviate when accounting for political affiliation. Combining “a great deal” and “somewhat,” and doing the same for “not so much” and “not at all,” FOX’s splits are 55/40. MSNBC’s are almost the exact same at 52/40.
When counting just Republicans, however, the split is 80/16 toward FOX and only 40/54 toward MSNBC. For Democrats, it’s 38/60 and 78/16, respectively.
It’s true that FOX News fared best when respondents were asked to name the most trustworthy of all networks. A plurality of 29 percent placed it at the top of the list, followed by CNN at 22 percent. None of the “Big Three” received more than 10 percent. And MSNBC, which is overt about its progressive bent, got just 7 percent, putting it last. (Even among Democrats, it’s statistically tied for second with NBC and CBS, all of which trail CNN by 17 to 18 points.)
The point is that there’s no one network that really stands ahead of its competitors, much less head and shoulders above. The same two-thirds of Americans have mixed feelings about ABC’s, CBS’ and NBC’s coverage of the news. CNN is a hair better. MSNBC’s hair is dyed blue, and people know it. FOX’s is red — and while it’s seen as having more cred, for the purposes of these numbers, it’s not enough to make it some undisputed king of trustworthiness. (Ratings-wise, it’s obviously a beast.)
Here, then, is the kicker about how Americans perceive their media today:
