Wall Street Journal Most Trusted Media Brand, Partisan Media Distrusted

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 4:47PM EST · Published Oct 7, 6:50AM EDT

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A new study from research firm Simmons gauges consumer trust of the media. Several old media were at the top of the list, led by The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal is trusted by 57.7% of respondents. It was followed by several other traditional media outlets–ABC News at 55.9%, CBS News at 55.4%, BBC News at 55.2%, and NBC News at 54.1%. Forbes was the only magazine on the list at 54.2%

Several newspapers were near the top–The New York Times at 53.8%, The Washington Post at 55.3%, and USA Today at 51.1%. Other newspapers were well down the list with the LA Times at 42.9%, the Chicago Tribune at 44.8%, and the San Francisco Chronicle at 34%

The two major news services ranked near the middle with Reuters at 46.6% and Bloomberg at 46.3%

Several partisan media were the bottom dwellers in the study with Breitbart at 27.4%, DailyKos at 27.4%, Palmer Report at 26.1%, Occupy Democrats at 24.7%, InfoWars at 24.3% and Daily Caller at 22.5%

The researchers for the Simmons News Media Trust Index pointed out that the media, in general, is losing the war for trustworthiness:

Based on our study, it is clear that news media is in crisis overall. The average percentage of respondents who rated news sources as trustworthy or very trustworthy was just 40.1% – not a ringing endorsement for journalism in general.

The same researchers worry that “fake news” has tainted all media to some extent. The results appear to show that.

Methodology: The Simmons Research News Media Trust Index was a subset of the Simmons Omnibus Study, fielded from August 14th to August 21st, 2018 with a sample of 2009 online respondents weighted to the US population. The margin of error was ± 2.2%.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.