Which News Sources Do Americans Trust?

Data from Pew Research Center shows that trust in national news organizations as a source of information has declined in the U.S. in 2024, mostly led by a drop in trust from Republican-leaning respondents. As the following chart shows, now Republicans are nearly equally likely to trust the information that comes from social media sites as they are to trust information from national news organizations. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 38 percent of respondents have at least some trust in the information that comes from social media sites, while 78 percent have at least some trust in national news organizations.

On both sides of the aisle, local news organizations are still perceived with higher levels of trust. Two thirds of Republican-leaning respondents (66 percent) said they trusted information from local news sources in 2024, although that too has fallen since 2016 (-13 percentage points). For Democratic-leaning respondents, 83 percent said the same of local news outlets (-2 percentage points from 2016).