America’s Most Trusted TV Channel

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 10, 9:30AM EDT

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America’s Most Trusted TV Channel — © nasacommons / Flickr

Turn on a cable-TV device, and there are hundreds of channels. Very few of them are mainstays of American public viewing. Look at a smartphone and how many media apps are there? Dozens. A magazine rack has publication after publication.

YouGov recently surveyed how Americans view the most prominent media properties. It included 56 TV, print, digital and social media brands. The study was titled “Trust in Media 2023: What news outlets do Americans trust most for Information?”

The research results were topped by The Weather Channel, which received an absurdly high score compared to other media. The score was based on the number of media that people listed as trustworthy or very trustworthy, less those rated as untrustworthy or very untrustworthy. (Here are the numbers of weather disasters in the past decade in each state ranked.)

What is surprising is that The Weather Channel’s score was +53. This means many people think the content of the channel is not trustworthy. Do they believe the weather people employed by the channel lie about the weather? Or perhaps they have been rained on when the forecast was for a sunny day.
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The Weather Channel was founded in 1982 and runs on almost every cable-TV system. It is owned by a joint venture that involves IBM and Alle Media Group. The channel runs 24 hours a day and provides national and local weather. It is famous for its coverage of disastrous weather events.

The study ranks PBS in second place with a score of +30. It is followed by the BBC at +24. Behind these are The Wall Street Journal at +24 and Forbes at +23.
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Media at the bottom of the list have negative scores. These are led by Inforwars at -16, The Daily Caller at -4 and Breitbart at -3. Most of the media with low scores are considered politically biased.
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The major media that receive low scores are CNN (+7), MSNBC (+5) and Fox News (+3).

The Weather Channel will stay at the top of this list if it is ever done again. The fact that only half of people find it trustworthy will be an ongoing mystery.

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.