Majority of teens hold negative views of news media, says report

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/biased-boring-chaotic-and-bad-a-majority-of-teens-hold-negative-views-of-news-media-report-finds/

by giuliomagnifico • 9 months ago

49 104 9 months ago

niemanlab.org

mbfg• 9 months ago

maybe the kids will save us, afterall.

gdulli3• 9 months ago

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.

skywhopper• 9 months ago

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.

Lord-Jobo• 9 months ago

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.

paganel• 9 months ago

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).

michaelscott• 9 months ago

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.

matheusmoreira2• 9 months ago

Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite.

If anything people are not radicalized enough.

pessimizer3• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

Aunche3• 9 months ago

Not exclusive to teens, but people are increasingly from somewhat biased fact based news to commentary based news that sounds agreeable to them.

jeffrallen• 9 months ago

My teen son loves The Onion.

Is this a data point? I have no idea, but he's cool and so is The Onion.

palmotea• 9 months ago

I too loved The Onion when I was a teen.

pessimizer3• 9 months ago

"The Onion" is a long sold-off brand that has nothing to do with that very funny midwestern free paper. It doesn't even have anything to do with that national media success of the 2000's.

It was first mostly sold off to the head of Strong Capital Management, moving to NY, then moved to Chicago under the editorship of "Cole Bolton - a Brown University graduate of business economics, former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and research associate at Harvard Business School." During that last move, 85% of the staff resigned. From there it was sold to Univision (the tv channel) and merged with Gizmodo. Then it was sold to private equity group Great Hill Partners, then sold off again to the founder of Twilio under whom Ben Collins was put in charge, former NBC "disinformation expert"/twitter troll and worst person on the planet.

That's just a quick summary of the 4K words offered by Wikipedia about the ownership history of this brand. Brands aren't actually things anymore, their purpose is to conceal things.

spicyusername• 9 months ago

I mean, the heyday of print news was almost a century ago and televised news decades ago.

Basically all digital news outlets, outside of just a few notable outliers, have no money to produce anything but low effort articles that are just a vehicle to show ads. And some of those are active propaganda outlets for basically nothing but evil interest groups.

What is there to have a positive view about...?

Society stopped paying for journalism and we got what we paid for.

behringer• 9 months ago

For TV news, can you even watch real news anymore outside of local news?

Everything everybody around me watches is just talking opinion heads.

nixpulvis2• 9 months ago

We need more public funding in independent accredited digital media.

pessimizer3• 9 months ago

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.

tehjoker2• 9 months ago

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.

nixpulvis2• 9 months ago

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.

bitlax• 9 months ago

This was the theory with the universities.

cbondurant• 9 months ago

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.

MangoToupe• 9 months ago

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

watwut• 9 months ago

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.

jasonlotito2• 9 months ago

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_lord2• 9 months ago

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.

Aunche3• 9 months ago

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...

BeFlatXIII3• 9 months ago

Make them disenfranchised write-offs.

ZeroGravitas2• 9 months ago

"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

itbeho• 9 months ago

I hear this "crime is down" theme a lot. But I see with my own eyes, in my own neighborhood, that the opposite is happening. Other people do as well and that is a big reason why the news media is viewed negatively.

giardini• 9 months ago

ZeroGravitas says>" it's been trending down most places for decades."<

The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.

There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 9 months ago

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".

gdulli3• 9 months ago

Dems Retreat to Round Earth Bubble, Succumb to Flat Earth Derangement Syndrome

add-sub-mul-div• 9 months ago

Strong agree. There seem to be a lot of people who think that being in the middle without taking a side is virtuous in itself, as if there's a law of equilibrium keeping both sides equally crazy or competent or corrupt at any time. In reality they're just getting dragged by the Overton window as other, richer people slide it around.

mensetmanusman6• 9 months ago

This is good. Too many have slept walk into trusting narratives with dubious outcomes.

bryanlarsen8• 9 months ago

Yes, it's great. Now they'll get all their narratives from TikTok.

la6776• 9 months ago

How reductive! I don't know what your qualms are with TikTok, but I can't imagine that decades of news media driven primarily by soundbites just as short as your average TikTok video can be seen as a superior "narrative delivery vehicle" ...unless you really place a premium on a corporate media bias influenced by pharmaceutical companies and the military industrial complex.

adolph• 9 months ago

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.

CuriouslyC• 9 months ago

Traditional media is basically dead, YouTube is in the process of killing it.

Zigurd• 9 months ago

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.

BeFlatXIII3• 9 months ago

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).

mensetmanusman6• 9 months ago

Everyone complains about the media, but few offer solutions.

My favorite type of solution is something along the lines of taxing organizations whose viewers are more disconnected from statistics on the ground (by a bipartisan independent board choosing the types of knowledge sets that a well informed population should have). We could also subsidize organizations that are doing well informing people.

This is a way of dealing with the externalities brought about by people having so much misinformation in their day-to-day decision-making.

FredPret3• 9 months ago

Almost any problem is better than that solution

mensetmanusman6• 9 months ago

If misinformation exists, it is analogous to pollution.

If misinformation exists, enemies of a state will spread it.

It’s a reasonable solution to consider taxing pollution and using funds to clean up the externalities.

dwa3592• 9 months ago

I think ground news is doing good work.

pkphilip• 9 months ago

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.

tryonqc2• 9 months ago

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.

Workaccount2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

yalogin• 9 months ago

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.

bdangubic• 9 months ago

kids do their own research :)

dec0dedab0de• 9 months ago

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 authoritative manner, we're more likely to forgive factual errors.

tryonqc2• 9 months ago

After the live streaming of a mass genocide by israel and the words used by mass media during their coverage it's 100% understandable.

jpalawaga2• 9 months ago

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_lord2• 9 months ago

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 add their own ~~bias~~ commentary.

In reality I think 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.

yunwal2• 9 months ago

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?

jpalawaga2• 9 months ago

I don’t know who that is but it doesn’t matter since you removed the second part of my comment. Do you think Paul Krugman would approve of that edit?

ZeroGravitas2• 9 months ago

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.

turtlebro• 9 months ago

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.

neoCrimeLabs• 9 months ago

Have similar studies been done over the decades?

I remember the same sentiment when I was a teen and the sentiment was common among my peers.

The times have changes significantly, and what is available to teens is very different now than what it was even 5 years ago.

That said, the teen brain likely has not changed much in that time. (trying to assert independence, be different than their parents, do what they want, trust what they want, etc)

silexia2• 9 months ago

The news media is heavily biased to the far left. This is due to the bias of ownership, as well as the low salary cost of young reporters who tend to lean left.

hollerith• 9 months ago

One of the causes of the bias is that decision-makers in the media organizations preferentially hired those that shared their ideological commitment. This is easier in fields where a worker cannot prevent his or her ideological commitment (or lack thereof) from showing in his or her work product. Besides journalism, other fields with this property are the social-science and humanities departments of universities, which is why those fields were captured by Leftist many decades ago whereas other fields were captured only much more recently.

One department of the social sciences has resisted capture by Leftists, at least in the US, at least the last time I looked, namely economics. One could argue that that is because it was captured first by liberal or libertarian ideologues.

This comment is restricted to the US and Britain because those are the only 2 societies I know well enough for my observations to have any value. Also, the OP is about American teenagers specifically.

bryanlarsen8• 9 months ago

Any European will tell you that US media is biased right.

silexia2• 9 months ago

Poor Europeans are trapped in a bureaucratic hellscape.

array_key_first• 9 months ago

This is so out of touch.

If you look at media in the US, they will actually bend over backwards to explain away what Trump is saying or doing. They will present "both sides" on equal footing when one side is legitimately insane. And, when they refer to his speeches and policy, they actually make it sounds much MORE reasonable than it is.

Like, when they play clips of trump speeches, they always leave out the 30+ minutes of rambling. And when Trump says something obviously racist, they, I'm sure in an effort to give the benefit of the doubt, explain it in a way that is not racist. Oh, maybe he said that they're eating the dogs and cats because he's misinformed...

The problem is normal people get only neutral benefits from the benefit of the doubt. But bad actors can, and do, abuse the benefit of the doubt and get much more out of it.

It's so bad that even when Trump does something fucking stupid and doesn't offer any coherent explanation, the media will actually make up potential explanations FOR him and talk about those. They're so biased in his favor he doesn't even need to make arguments any more - they will make arguments for him that are reasonable sounding.

And, keep in mind, I'm not referring to Fox here. This is CNN and MSNBC.

Seriously, go listen to what they say trump said or did and then listen or read what Trump ACTUALLY did. It's always much, much worse.

sys_64738• 9 months ago

It's a race to the bottom in this AI slop world we now live in. That's the problem with trying to get eyeballs in a mass alternatives universe. To stand out you need to get more radical and extreme to keep your audience. Eventually the general population click and realize that the alternative media is generally trash. That's when people start looking back at quality media. It's just a vicious circle.

kylehotchkiss• 9 months ago

News media tends to be so macro (national) and rarely local. Why do we need so many macro details that don’t impact our day to day life that much?

incomingpain• 8 months ago

Im not a teen, but when google news came out and I started using it; it was immediately obvious journalism was going to be in major crisis going forward.

I didnt predict that journalists seeing that they are all often wrong; that they'd double down on being even more wrong. Then AI came in and dropped the quality of journalism a significant amount more.

Journalists have only themselves to blame. It will be interesting to see how they improve the situation.

Majority of teens hold negative views of news media, says report

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