Even as views of the traditional media change under President Donald Trump, pollsters are just starting to weigh political views of its newer cousin, social media. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Media winning battle for trust with Trump As the president attacks the press, its standing in polls rises.

Americans may not like the media, but polls are indicating that they trust it more and more — especially compared with President Donald Trump.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll out earlier this week was the latest to tap into the trend. Of the 14,300 people surveyed, 48 percent expressed a “great deal of” or “some” confidence in the press — a figure that was up from 39 percent in November 2016. People with “hardly any” confidence in the media dropped from 51 percent to 45 percent.


Other pollsters have reached similar findings. Last month, Gallup reported a 9 percentage point increase in “trust and confidence” in mass media from a year ago, rising to 41 percent from 32 percent.

And in August, 54 percent of respondents replied to a Quinnipiac University poll that they trusted the media more than Trump to tell “the truth about important issues.” Just 36 percent responded in favor of Trump. Those results came despite previous Quinnipiac findings that Americans are not exactly wild about the media: In an October 2016 poll, 55 percent of respondents said that they believed the news media were biased against the president and, in January, 57 percent responded that the media was not honest.

“Confidence in the media has gone up this year while confidence in the executive branch has gone down,” said Chris Kahn, Reuters’ U.S. political polling editor.

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Kahn added that when the president weighs in on a subject, he usually heavily influences how people feel. Trump has certainly weighed in on the media. His war on the press may have reached a new level Thursday morning, when he tweeted: “Why Isn't the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!”

“Donald Trump tends to have a polarizing effect on public opinion,” Kahn said.

Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, noted that his poll’s findings on media basically mirror Trump’s approval. Just as the count was 54-36 percent on whether the media or Trump was more trustworthy, in the same poll, Trump registered a 35 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval rating.

“How you feel about the press is probably a function of to some degree how you feel about President Trump,” Brown said. “He has tried and to a considerable degree made the press an opposition party.”

This does not mean, though, that people have necessarily come around to liking the press as an institution. As Kahn noted, the 48 percent figure in the Reuters/Ipsos poll is relatively low and, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll out Thursday, just 31 percent said they had a favorable view of the press, compared with 54 percent unfavorable.

“I think you can say that while Americans might not particularly like the media, they may trust the media more,” Tim Malloy, another assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said. To be sure, the wording of the questions has a large amount to do with the responses. But he said that someone could easily carry an unfavorable view of the media, even as they express “some” confidence in how reporters are doing their job.

“You can have an uptrend in confidence, you can have an uptrend in approval, even for an institution that is relatively unpopular,” Kahn said. “Think of a quarterback who you weren’t particularly happy with but had a couple of good games, so maybe you’re still not 100 percent trusting that quarterback, but the track record is looking pretty good, at least recently.”

Kahn added that while Democrats certainly expressed much more confidence (68 percent with a “great deal of” or “some”) in the press than Republicans (31 percent), the trend of increasing confidence existed in both parties. Democratic confidence in media was up 11 points in the Reuters/Ipsos poll since last year and Republican confidence was up 3 points, despite the president’s constant attacks.

Even as views of the traditional media change under Trump, pollsters are just starting to weigh political views of its newer cousin, social media. The Suffolk/USA Today poll asked three questions about Facebook: By a margin of 46 percent to 26 percent, registered voters thought Facebook should have done more to identify and publicize Russian-bought ads during the campaign; by a margin of 58 percent to 24 percent, they thought Facebook should release the ads publicly; and by 77 percent to 11 percent, respondents said that the social media platforms should be required to label who paid for political ads, as TV and radio outlets must.

It was the first time Suffolk had ever asked questions about Facebook, according to David Paleologos, director of the university’s Political Research Center.

“I think when you look at that 77 number,” Paleologos said, “that’s a big number … I expected it would be high, I did not think it would be that high.”

Paleologos said he could think of little political polling done on Facebook in the past. Kahn said that Reuters had never asked political questions about Facebook, though it may in the future.

“We should think about that next time,” he said.