Majority of teens hold negative views of news media, says report
64 comments
·November 7, 2025cbondurant
Aunche
You're overestimating the number of people who trust scientific concensus. More people believe in creationism than evolution by purely natural selection. What's your alternative to treating both sides with equal weight without making the unscientific side feel disenfranchised?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...
BeFlatXIII
Make them disenfranchised write-offs.
Eddy_Viscosity2
Its a long-standing criticism, where if the president suddenly announced that he thought the earth was flat, the New York Times headline the next day would be "Shape of the Earth; Views Differ".
ZeroGravitas
"crime is on the rise" is a strange example to give as it's been trending down most places for decades.
So it's a perfect example of, assuming they're not knowingly lying, focusing on random noise in the signal to generate misleading stories
MangoToupe
Not to mention problems often have many causes and many possible solutions—even framing the reporting having merely two sides is crippling to news quality
jasonlotito
I've heard this referred to as sanewashing. You really started noticing this with Trump. Compare what he literally says to what he's quoted as saying. He likes to rail against MSM, but man, they do a lot of heavy lifting, making it seem like what he says is remotely sane.
noir_lord
They often edit his speeches for brevity because they don't have time in a news report to post the full hour long ramble of tangents off tangents off tangents even doing that makes his speeches seem considerably more coherent than they actually are if you watch the whole thing.
watwut
One problem is that the most distrust toward "traditional media" is from people who completely trust to even more dishonest resources. It is not that traditional media would be perfect, but their faults are not the actual reason for the fall of trust.
Instead, it is well paid grifters for whom the issue with traditional media is that they do not lie enough.
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pkphilip
I am not sure if this scepticism is exclusive to the teens. I think a lot of people are more and more sceptical about news media and the close ties it has with the establishment - especially the way we have seen different platforms "manage" the news on behalf of the establishment.
tryonqc
The way the US media handles news the same way throughout their network is very scary and it's hard to believe anything they say when they repeat word for word what everyone else says.
LWT has great montage on this.
jpalawaga
I think it’s easy, too easy, to say something like “all mainstream media is biased and untrustworthy.”
The problem is, who do you trust instead? Twitter? Like that’s not biased. Actually I think it’s much worse. Not only is the editor of Twitter very biased, but it’s filled with bots and there is nobody providing any reliable fact checking. It’s very easy for motivated parties to portray a fringe idea as mainstream. It’s also easy to shout the truth out of the room. What one person tweet is just as valuable as another. Dunking on people (ratioing, etc) becomes your signal.
TikTok? Maybe less easy to influence, but now the editor is an adversarial nation state.
YouTube? If you thought msm wanted engagement, YouTube is much worse.
Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful, and for the few that are independent for legitimate reasons, don’t have the resources to do consistent factual reporting in anything more than a very narrow domain.
Long story short, maybe msm is imperfect, but imo it’s the best we got. And I’d rather have some source of truth that is at least attempting to fact check and get the truth right, even if biased, because when you don’t have any truth compass—when all information is equal regardless of how far from reality it is—it becomes very easy to be manipulated.
Now who would want that?
noir_lord
I don't trust any of them entirely (including these two) but I use Reuters and AP for world news, they have commercial reasons to at least combat bias since they provide the news to the other orgs who then had their own ~~bias~~ commentary.
In reality the answer is much the same as it has always been, read the same thing from different sources and apply some critical thinking to it.
Unbiased media is simply not possible, you could 100% tell the entire story about whatever story you are telling and still be biased by the stories you don't run.
As for what we do about young people, education on media literacy in schools would help though whether already pressed schools end up been responsible for yet another thing is a good idea is going to vary from country to country but we should be preparing people for the society they are going to be living in better and that always comes back to education.
yunwal
> Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful
Paul Krugman has his own substack. You think he couldn't get his old job back at the Times in a second if he wanted to?
dec0dedab0de
Does anyone under 65 consume traditional news anymore? They don't even try to hide their own biases these days, it's kinda gross. Sure, the same interests have found their way onto social media by influencing influencers, but the expectations are lower.
Though I think the real problem is if you are somewhat knowledgeable about any topic, the news will always get important details incorrect when they cover it. I believe there is a famous quote about that, but I definitely noticed it when I was a teenager in the 90s. I think this is the real reason Jon Stewart is the most trusted news figure for people of a certain age, and why social media/streamers/whatever are more trusted for younger people. That is, if you present things in a less authorative manner, we're more likely to forgive factual errors.
turtlebro
According to the news media, we have been living in perpetual crisis, closing in on apocalyptic times for the last 10+ years. Constant fear and negativity through Radio, TV, Internet throughout every day, from the moment you wake up.
Yes, they are just doing their job, but here's the thing: Hardly any of it is relevant to me. Everyday its TRUMP this, that. Please tell me why should I care? Why are you putting this shit into my mind, how is this my problem?
It's getting harder and harder to disconnect from all that garbage. Unsolicited attention grabbing is what it is. Like a dumb movie everyone has to watch.
It wasn't always like this. People didn't care much about politics, sometimes you caught the news of a plane crash or something tragic, but for the most part they had their own life's to live. Now everyone is hopelessly addicted to the spectacle.
And social media isn't making it any better. I don't know if I'm seeing too grim, but please tell me you feel it as well, when you see people just regurgitating the latest dumb shit wherever you go.
Then you visit a poor country for holiday, outside the western/anglosphere, and see all those people just living their lives, not fully consumed in some narrative.
yalogin
How journalism and media evolve is key to democracy over the long run. Its inability to change and adapt to the times has already caused grave damage, but the damage it will cause going forward could be greater. Social media and the supposed advantage to having a camera in every hand did not pan out at all and in fact became a negative.
nixpulvis
We need more public funding in independent accredited digital media.
bitlax
This was the theory with the universities.
pessimizer
There's no such thing as government funded independent media.
And there's no accreditation for journalists except in authoritarian states like Zimbabwe. Journalists use the same freedom of speech as everyone else.
nixpulvis
> There's no such thing as government funded independent media.
That is just ridiculously false. Take for example the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which was recently forced to shut down due to losing its federal funding.
And I'm not talking about accreditation for individual journalists. I'm talking about funding reputable and honest publication groups.
With more funding to improve local coverage and access, we not only get better diversity of reporting, we also help cover local events and topics better for people.
tehjoker
That's true, but government funded media has different incentives than private media. To be honest, at least in the past few decades where media has become so concentrated, we basically have state media anyway but it is profit driven and sensationalist. Public media would at least allow investigative reporting to come back and provide an alternative choice in the market that is less sensationalist.
modo_mario
The bbc was recently caught splicing trump clips together to make it sound like he said something else. Mind you I don't like Trump but the BBC is often touted as the best example in the anglosphere and repeatedly shows it isn't immune to these issues.
I do think it's good that there's a well funded option tho. I'd love it if they also focused on non opinionated documentaries since private media gutted ones like NatGeo and such.
CuriouslyC
Traditional media is basically dead, YouTube is in the process of killing it.
Zigurd
A lot of it is hilariously outdated looking. A man in a suit and a woman with a $300 hairdo saying innocuous things feels like time travel to the 1990s. It would be like designing a car with real chrome bumpers that rust.
Even on YouTube, if I start playing a documentary and it's got dramatic background music and a stentorian voiceover, straight to YT jail.
BeFlatXIII
I like how you provided examples both proving that some things were better in the past (real chrome bumpers) and that others were measurably worse (the news theatrics).
Workaccount2
On the surface this feels right, "Oh look, the kids can see through the bullshit".
But this assumes that the kids have a stable honest reference point, and from there are calling out the bullshit.
That is almost certainly not the case. What is far more likely, is that kids are getting their news from random tiktoks that are farming views with credible bullshit, and from that totally deranged reference point, the kids are calling the news bullshit.
You will find few people more hostile towards contemporary journalism than me, and you will find no one more hostile towards "self proclaimed social media news producer" than me. I could write essays about the people in my life who left behind journalism produced news to go completely off the deep end getting "the truth" from tiktok.
PaulKeeble
Its everything, there are kids that have gone back to the primary source and are reading the science or primary materials and you have people believing grifters on tiktok and everything in between. Traditional journalism forming one version of the worlds collective reality has fractured and in its place is a lot of different sources many of which are worse.
ZeroGravitas
Feels weird to lump all media together.
Ironically this is something I see in media a lot and dislike. Things like "80% of people think country going in the wrong direction".
Well while you're polling them, ask which direction is correct. Because 40% wanting less Trump bullshit and 40% wanting more Trump bullshit is totally different than letting your average reader assume 80% agree with their own assesment of what's wrong.
I want people to have strongly negative views on Fox News and the even worse variants of that kind of propaganda.
mbfg
maybe the kids will save us, afterall.
Aunche
Not exclusive to teens, but people are increasingly from somewhat biased fact based news to commentary based news that sounds agreeable to them.
gdulli
> None of the students — even in an elective course about media — confessed any interest in becoming a journalist. A few could name news organizations they trusted but others said the news came to them through social media or what friends shared or what they overheard as their parents were watching television.
> A little less than half (45%) of teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than to protect it.
These kids? Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite. People have been trained to distrust institutions because that makes them manipulable by even worse actors.
matheusmoreira
> Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite.
If anything people are not radicalized enough.
Lord-Jobo
All true, however almost all of the students respond with interest in becoming influencers (don’t have the survey on hand, it’s been done a few times). And influencers include the TikTok age equivalent of journalists. For better and (definitely) for worse. Some of them are functionally the same, many are far far worse.
The kids just don’t have any interest in big news organizations which is understandable even if it’s going to make things worse.
michaelscott
I am not young, but I have never seen a major institution (including governments) caring about citizens in aggregate in my lifetime. To me, this is an artifact of the 50s or 60s, some bygone era (which is funny, because the government did not care about citizens in aggregate back then either).
I can only imagine how the younger kids see things. They're bombarded by public knowledge of nasty things institutions did in the bigoted/ignorant past, underhanded things they're definitely doing now, an anger/fear inducing news cycle and endless social media conspiracy theories (some of which end up being true) engineered for clicks. Extreme cynicism is a logical conclusion.
D-Machine
Precisely this. The idea of trusting that a news corporation (or any other corporation) cares about you is just utterly absurd in 2025. We all know now, and have for some time, that, factually, this is not how things work, and profit (or funding) has to come first, or the corporation does not survive. It isn't even cynicism, just a recognition of the economic realities of contemporary society.
paganel
> Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite.
Which means that the institutions should do a lot better, which they don't. The demos is always right, that's why we live in a democracy (or at least we strive to) and not in a technocracy (where, presumably, the institutions are right by default).
matheusmoreira
> The demos is always right
Bullshit. The demos is so goddamn stupid it can't be helped, it must be led. Explaining things to them does nothing. People will sacrifice freedom for convenience and short term profit every single time. They vote with emotions. They make decisions that impact entire nations without even trying to gain even a superficial understanding of things. The demos is completely responsible for the horrible status quo. Their ignorance and passivity is exactly what leads to their oppression. Trying to help them leads to nothing but pointless martyrdom, nothing changes because change depends on them.
> not in a technocracy
We're literally in the technofeudalist era. We have trillion dollar corporations running digital fiefdoms with users as the serfs tilling the artificially scarce fields. They have so much money it's unreal, and they have woken up to the wonders of lobbying.
mensetmanusman
Yes, most of the issues in journalism come from extremely low diversity of thought.
I laugh when I occasionally listen to NPR and within a few minutes hear an absurdly framed commentary that clearly hasn’t steel manned alternative viewpoints.
skywhopper
The institutions they distrust are controlled by bad actors. How is it good to trust sources of propaganda and lies? Yes, there’s worse stuff out there. There’s also far better.
bryanlarsen
> There’s also far better.
No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better, but there isn't any group that's better. There are individual podcasters that are better than mainstream media as a group, but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media. And you could say the same for any social site, or any other group such as politicians or religious figures or ...
pessimizer
They won't. We've given them a absurdly concentrated garbage news media that there's no reason to trust any part of, but it isn't like they're getting anything else. They're going to be the most ignorant generation in US history.
I remember being shocked when I found out that most Vietnamese young people were mostly unaware of the Vietnam war. But if nobody tells you, you don't know. The media was bad before 1996 (Ben Bagdikian would put out a book every year about how dangerously concentrated media was getting: only 51 owners owned 90% of the media lol), but at least we could go to the library and find out what actually happened. They'll just have continually-revised ebooks and AI.
matthewaveryusa
Just to play devil's advocate with some pointed questions:
What is so important about the Vietnam war for the day-to-day of the Vietnamese young?
It's the generation that have fallen prey to today's social media and garbage news outlets telling us that history is important -- why should the young be credulous to the gullible?
If the old adage "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is to be acted upon, it is without a doubt not to study history and try to remember the past because clearly we're always repeating it.
So what is important and constant across time? Those that have empathy (or fake empathy) for the masses and can galvanize them have the power to drive society. Perception is reality more than facts are reality in all but the sciences. If the world were to reset and humans were stripped of all tools, they would re-invent math, science, biology, physics. I doubt that our laws, traditions and zeitgeist would be replicated.
adolph
Is there an irony in this? The negativity cognitive bias often used by news media to increase the salience of their output now affects the perception of their product.
I think the biggest thing that makes me distrust the news as it stands is that I feel like news reporting is far too prone to overly leveling debates. And by that I mean making both sides come across as equally credible, even when that could not be further from the truth.
The most common way I see it happen is like this: you have a situation some group says that some totally safe thing is actually super dangerous. There's a large body of scientific literature that really clearly shows its totally safe. the news reports on it as such: "While many within the scientific community state that there is no harm with X, anti-X proponents respond that the current studies are not substantial enough, and that they are simply asking questions." This framing, does not point out that the anti-X proponents are just a group of 10 people, nor does it describe how much evidence there exists in the scientific literature showing the thing is safe. Both sides are made to sound equally reasonable, which in my mind is practically a lie by omission. Because they aren't equally reasonable.
Edit: One additional thought. I still will read news articles if they get shared to me, and I try to evaluate based off of what the source is. but another reason I don't actively keep a news subscription is because news orgs love reporting on tragedy. Because its more noteworthy. I'm just not interested in reading yet another article about how crime is on the rise. Or about the most recent fatal car crash. Etc.
I stare into the void enough as it is. I don't want another.