Confidence In TV News and Newspapers (Slightly) Up

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

Some heartening news for those in the newspaper and TV News industries. Gallup’s annual poll of the public’s confidence in institutions has found that Americans’ confidence in newspapers and TV News is up on last year. Twenty-eight percent of those interviewed for the poll said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, compared to 25 percent last year; the jump for TV news was from 22 percent to 27 percent.

While heartening, those figures aren’t much to sing about. They’re still well down on nineties levels and, according to Gallup’s findings, newspapers ranked tenth in terms of confidence among sixteen institutions, while TV News ranked behind at eleventh. (The military was number one, small business number two, and Congress last, naturally.) But good news is hard to come by in this racket and the poll at least hints at progress.

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