Consumer satisfaction with online news brands in the U.S. 2007-2021

Data on consumer satisfaction with selected online news brands in the United States from 2007 to 2021 showed that customer satisfaction with internet news and opinion sites generally improved over that period, until 2020 which showed a drop in satisfaction rates for all outlets aside from CNN.com and HuffPost. In 2021, the online news brand with the highest satisfaction rating was FOXNews.com with a score of 72, though this marked a drop from previous years.

Credibility and trust

Consumer satisfaction with news brands depends on many factors, but trust, reliability, and credibility are of growing importance to news audiences, and the calls for news outlets to ensure that their content is non-partisan are becoming louder. The credibility of major news organizations in the United States fluctuates each year but was overall lower than usual in 2021, and trust in news is also waning. Results from an annual study looking at the objectivity of the mass media revealed that the share of adults who admitted having no trust at all in the news to tell the truth increased by ten percent between 2018 and 2020. Trust in national and local news also fell between 2016 and 2021.

Consumer perspectives

Consumers have also begun to question how much bias they may encounter in the news they read. Over 50 percent of U.S. adults responding to a study believed there was a fair or large amount of bias in news sources used most often by the public, and less than ten percent believed there was no bias in the news at all. Fake news is also a concern, and between 2018 and 2021, there was an increase in the percentage of U.S. adults who felt that the government should intervene to prevent fake news circulating online.