Caroline Simon

USA TODAY

A lack of trust in the mainstream media isn't just a phenomenon among Donald Trump supporters — it's common among young people all along the political spectrum.

A newly released study from Data & Society and the Knight Foundation found that today’s teenagers and young adults have worryingly low levels of trust in the news media.

Interviews with 52 participants in three cities show that young people are widely skeptical of the news and concerned that their news sources were inaccurate or biased.

“The news is only what the majority wants to hear,” one participant, a 22-year-old African-American female, told researchers. “It’s never the complete truth, and it may be false in some aspects. … There’s bias in the language. Loaded words. It’s just the way they word it.”

While young people may be increasingly skeptical of news media, that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to navigate it. The study also found that young people often check multiple news outlets to verify stories, and are aware of the bias in many news outlets.

Not surprisingly, for many young people, newspapers, TV shows and websites aren’t even the first place they look for news. Social media, increasingly, is the primary source for updates on what’s going on in the world, and people are more likely to trust a story if they trust the person who shared it, not the source itself.

“Ultimately, mainstream media was serving as more of an elevator of news stories rather than an originator of news stories for young people,” said Mary Madden, one of the study’s authors.

For college journalists — many of whom want to pursue careers in journalism after graduation — the results are worrying, but not necessarily surprising.

"I think it's kind of in line with my understanding of the challenge of attracting a young audience, in terms of presenting the news in a way that people want to click on," said Andy Duehren, a junior at Harvard and the managing editor of the Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper. "I would say I'm definitely very worried about it, and I think it poses big problems to society at large if people are not trusting reputable news sources."

Related: Voices: A journalism student's response to Trump's attack on media

Duehren has noticed a tendency among his peers to gravitate towards news outlets that have a liberal lean, like the Huffington Post, particularly over the last year.

"Speaking as a Harvard student, where a lot of students are liberal or voted Democrat or voted for Clinton, I have seen a shift toward consuming more left-wing or liberal media sources, maybe in addition to or in place of the New York Times or nonpartisan mainstream media," he said.

The study was conducted last summer, amid a string of controversial police shootings involving unarmed black men. Madden said that affected people’s views on user-generated content.

“That was a very big shift in the public’s thinking about documentation of controversial events,” she said. “That sense that what you see on a livestream video is less likely to be subject to manipulation.”

At the same time, increasing political divisions have highlighted Americans’ distrust of the media on the whole. And although that distrust is often associated with conservatives, people across the political spectrum are losing trust in traditional news sources.

Melissa Zimdars, a professor of communication at Merrimack College whose list of fake news organizations was widely shared after the election, chalked some of the distrust up to opinion that look like news articles. These pieces, often shared on social media because they’re provocative, can lead viewers to falsely ascribe bias to the news outlet that published them.

That’s feeding the overall distrust, she said, that can delegitimize real facts and information.

“I do think it’s a problem if we now approach all information with such distrust or if we perceive all information as being equally debatable,” she said. “That’s something that does scare me a little bit.”

Related: So about that viral list of fake news sites ...

A lack of trust in institutions like the media doesn’t bode well for young people’s civic engagement, according to Paul Mihailidis, a communication professor at Emerson College. If they don’t trust the news, they might not feel like they can have an impact.

“When young people are less trustful in the news and also don’t see pathways to having a voice in the process or having some agency or a sense of how they can participate, that skepticism quickly turns to cynicism,” he said.

For some young people, that distrust was an impetus for making change. Josh Gremillion co-founded the Millennial Post, a nonpartisan news website that defines its mission as “building a bridge from an untrusted industry to a misinformed generation.”

“A lot of people our age — they just want the facts, they just want the truth, they don’t want to go to a site and wonder, ‘Is this what I should believe?’” Gremillion said. “A lot of people won’t even turn on Fox or CNN or MSNBC or any of the other outlets because they’re just sick of hearing all the negativity.”

Related: How universities are tackling the fake news problem

But Madden noted that the study’s results fit into a larger pattern of declining trust in institutions, a phenomenon that’s gotten a great deal of attention over the past year. She’s concerned about what that means for productive dialogue on controversial issues.

“Certainly,” she said, “In terms of having a reasonable conversation or public debate that can be anchored by agreed-upon facts of story or situation, we are at an unprecedented moment of uncertainty.”

Read next: 7 ways to spot fake news stories

Caroline Simon is a University of Pennsylvania student and a USA TODAY College correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.