Editing Media bias (section)

== Trust in media ==
Perceptions of media bias and trust in the media have changed significantly from 1985-2011 in the US. Pew studies reported that the percentage of Americans who trusted that news media “get their facts straight” dropped from 55% in 1985, to 25% in 2011. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who trusted that news organizations would deal fairly with all sides when dealing with political and social issues dropped from 34% in 1985 to 16% in 2011. By 2011 almost two-thirds of respondents considered news organizations to be “politically biased in their reporting”, up from 45% in 1985.<ref name="Groeling" /> Similar decreases in trust have been reported by Gallup, with In 2022, half of Americans responded that they believed that news organizations would deliberately attempt to mislead them.<ref name="Bauder">{{cite news |last1=Bauder |first1=David |date=February 15, 2023 |title=Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them |url=https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/ |access-date=7 June 2023 |agency=Associated Press |language=en |via=Fortune}}</ref>

Jonathan M. Ladd (2012), who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of belief in media bias is telling people that particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased, he found, was extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.<ref>Jonathan M. Ladd, ''Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters'', "This leads us to the two most likely sources of the public's increasing antipathy toward the media: tabloid coverage and elite opinion leadership.", p. 126, "...&nbsp;Democratic elite criticism and Republican elite criticism (of the media) can reduce media confidence across a broad spectrum of the public.", p. 127, "...&nbsp;the evidence also indicates that little of the decline (in media trust) can be explained by direct reaction to news bias." p. 125, Princeton University Press, 2012, {{ISBN|978-0-691-14786-4}}.</ref>