Media

BBC, Fox, PBS Are Most Trusted News Brands; Trump Is Least Trusted

Paul Ausick

Published: August 1, 2018 8:15 am

Last Updated: January 11, 2020 8:05 pm

While the president of the United States makes a special point of branding TV news coverage he doesn’t like as fake news, his own ratings as a trusted source of news are only half as high as the least-trusted source among 10 TV news brands.

The data were reported Wednesday morning by Brand Keys, based on its 2018 Customer Loyalty & Engagement Index. The firm polled more than 4,000 TV viewers who regularly watch each network (at least three times a week).

The most trusted brand in TV news is the U.K.’s state-supported BBC with a 90% rating. Fox News ranked second with a score of 87%, and U.S. publicly supported PBS ranked third at 86%.

Why include the president in the survey? According to the report:

As President Trump has assailed news (of all varieties) as “Fake News,” and more recently “the enemy of the people,” Brand Keys was interested to see how much “trust” viewers actually had in the President, versus the TV brands.

His score was a paltry 29%, less than a third of the BBC’s trust score and half that of local news broadcaster — and Trump loyalist — Sinclair Broadcast Group, which posted a score of 58%.

Here is the full list and their trust scores:

• BBC: 90%
• Fox: 87%
• PBS: 86%
• Bloomberg: 81%
• MSNBC: 80%
• CBS: 72%
• NBC: 70%
• ABC: 69%
• CNN: 69%
• Sinclair: 58%
• Trump: 29%

According to Brand Keys, these were Trump’s trust scores based on the political affiliation of the respondents: Democrats, 14%; Independents, 22%; Republicans, 35%. The rest either did not answer or had no opinion.