> Media consumption was at record highs in 2020, but trust plummeted. 1. News media viewership and trust in the content are two very distinct things. 2. Refer

> Media consumption was at record highs in 2020, but trust plummeted. 1. News media viewership and trust in the content are two very distinct things. 2. Referring to news as a "consumption" good already kind of answers the question of why it is not to be trusted. > But as people consumed more news, they also began to trust the media less No. Their low trust decreased even more. It was low before the 2020 elections as well. > A Pew survey suggests 95 per cent of MSNBC's audience are now Democrats while 93 per cent of the Fox News audience are Republicans. Well, those two sources are highly partisan: MSNBC is known as "MS-DNC" (for the Democratic National Committee) and Fox was created by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, with GOP man Roger Ailes at the helm from early on, to serve the Republican Party and a right-wing/"conservative" agenda from the get-go. These are not trustworthy bodies _structurally_, even before you examine their specific contents. What could be said to distinguish the recent few years - other than Covid-19 - is the fact that the established Republican and Democratic party have a sort of a modus operandi with the various large corporate news outlets, so that neither side points out inconsistencies and misconduct of the other beyond a certain point. Trump and many of his followers, however, were not in on this cultural norm, and lashed out against news media (mostly the Democratic-party-supporting outlets). Some of the complaints were justified, many/most weren't, but the point is that people were now hearing a prominent voice suggesting that they question mainstream news. This may not be the only factor - the prevalence of online news sources in recent years may have also had an effect, and probably some other factors - but this struck me as quite influential.