Trust in the American press went up this year. On September 29, 2026, Gallup published its annual reading on confidence in newspapers, television and radio, and the number climbed from 28% to 33%. Axios ran it the same day under the headline “Republicans’ trust in media makes sharp comeback.” If you only read the headlines from the past decade, that sounds impossible. If you read the fine print, it makes sense, and the fine print is where a PR strategy gets built.
Here’s the problem with how most brands use media trust statistics. They quote the scariest number, shrug, and keep pitching the same national outlets they always pitched. That misses the point. Trust hasn’t vanished. It has moved: toward local outlets, toward specific brands people use every week, toward named experts, and away from the abstract idea of “the media.” The brands that win coverage in 2026 follow that movement. The ones that lose keep pitching to an audience that stopped believing.
What follows is every major trust dataset worth knowing, each with its year, and then a scoring model for turning the numbers into placement decisions.
Why did American trust in the media just go up?
Start with the longest-running series. Gallup has asked Americans how much they trust the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” since the 1970s. In 1976 the figure hit 72%, the high-water mark. By 1997 it was 53%. By 2004 it was 44%. In September 2025, Gallup recorded 28%, the first reading below 30% in the poll’s history, with 34% saying they had no trust at all.
The 2026 reading, fielded September 1 to 17 with 1,000 adults, came back at 33%. That is a real move outside the poll’s four-point margin of error. But look at who moved. Republicans went from 8% in 2025 (their first single-digit reading ever) to 22% in 2026. Democrats sat at 50%, essentially flat against 51% the year before. Independents held at 31%, statistically unchanged. Gallup did not offer a single cause, and it noted the poll closed before the September 18 decision to deny several news organizations White House access, so that event isn’t in the data.
The bottom line hasn’t changed much. In 2026, a third of Americans trust the media, a third trust it “not very much,” and a third trust it not at all. The rebound came from one party, off a historic floor. A brand that reads the 33% as a recovery and goes back to spraying national pitches will misread its own audience.
There’s a second lesson buried in the trend line. Trust swings with politics, and it swings by group, not as a whole. Last year’s 8% among Republicans and this year’s 22% are both true snapshots of the same people. Any plan that treats “the public” as one block will be wrong for at least one of the blocks your buyers belong to.
Global trust in news just hit its lowest level on record
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, released in June and built on close to 100,000 respondents across 48 markets, put overall trust in news at 37%. That ties the lowest figure since the Institute started measuring trust in 2015. Trust had held at 40% for three straight years before this drop, and it declined in roughly half of the markets surveyed.
The U.S. figure in the same report is 25%. Only a quarter of Americans say they trust most news most of the time, and among right-leaning Americans the number falls to 15%. Note the difference between Gallup’s 33% and Reuters’ 25%. They ask different questions with different methods, so neither cancels the other. Use both, cite the year and the source, and you’ll stay out of trouble with any editor who checks.
The single most useful line in the 2026 report for anyone in PR is this one: trust in the most widely used individual news brands is holding up better than trust in news overall. People distrust “the news” as a category while still trusting the specific outlets they open every morning. That gap is your opening. A pitch doesn’t land in “the media.” It lands in a named publication with a named audience, and that audience may trust it far more than any survey of the category suggests.
Read the country spread before you pitch outside the U.S.
The global average hides a huge range. In the 2026 Digital News Report, Kenya and Nigeria tie at the top with 68% trust, followed by Finland at 63%, Denmark at 55% and Norway at 53%. Hong Kong and Sweden come in at 52%, Portugal at 51%, South Africa at 50% and the Netherlands at 49%. At the other end, Serbia and Slovakia sit among the five lowest-trust markets, and only 14% of people on the political left in Greece say they trust news overall.
For a brand running international PR, that spread changes the math. A feature in a major Finnish daily carries trust with a majority of the readers who see it. A comparable feature in a low-trust market reaches readers who discount the source before they finish the headline. Placement in a high-trust market does more work per article, so the bar for what counts as a “good” outlet should rise and fall with the market.
Avoidance matters as much as trust. Reuters found 42% of people across its markets say they sometimes or often avoid the news, essentially flat on the year but up from 29% in 2017. In Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Turkey, avoidance runs at 60% or higher. In those markets, even trusted outlets reach fewer people than their traffic suggests, because a big share of the audience is actively looking away. Pitch stories that read as useful (a cost, a fix, a local consequence) instead of stories that read as more bad news, because the avoiders are the ones who skip the depressing stuff first.
Edelman says media trust is rising. So who is right?
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, fielded October 23 to November 18, 2025 with 33,938 respondents across 28 countries, puts global trust in media at 54%, up two points from 2025. The U.S. figure is 44%. In the UK, media trust came in at 39%, up three points but still well below UK trust in business (51%) and NGOs (50%).
So Edelman shows 44% U.S. trust, Gallup shows 33%, and Reuters shows 25%. All three are accurate. Edelman measures trust in media as an institution to “do what is right,” on a different scale and with an online sample. Reuters asks whether you trust most news most of the time. Gallup asks about mass media reporting fully and fairly. When you cite any of these media trust statistics in a pitch or a report, name the survey and the year, because a journalist who covers this beat will know the difference instantly.
The more useful Edelman findings for PR sit beside the media number. The 2026 report’s theme is insularity: seven in ten people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, information sources or background. Meanwhile, 78% trust their own employer, and scientists (76%) and teachers (73%) remain the most trusted groups of people. Read those together. Audiences trust people who look and sound like credentialed specialists, and they trust them more than they trust institutions. That’s a direct instruction for how to staff your quotes.
Local news keeps the trust that national outlets lose
Pew Research Center’s September 2025 survey of 5,195 U.S. adults is the clearest evidence that trust has moved rather than disappeared. Seventy percent of Americans said they have at least some trust in information from local news organizations. Only 56% said the same about national news organizations, down 11 points from March 2025 and 20 points from 2016.
The partisan gap shrinks at the local level. Among Republicans, 64% trust local news versus 44% for national outlets. Among Democrats, it’s 78% for local versus 69% for national, and the national figure is the lowest Pew has recorded for Democrats. Republicans across every age group land between 61% and 66% on local trust. Local news is the closest thing America has to a shared, cross-party source.
Journalists see the same pattern from the other side of the inbox. In Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 survey of journalists, 78% said a pitch feels relevant when it affects their audience’s community. So the trust data and the newsroom data point the same way. A local angle earns coverage more easily, and the coverage it earns carries more credibility with a broader slice of readers. A Phoenix business mentioned in a Phoenix outlet gets believed by Phoenix customers of both parties. A national hit may reach more eyeballs, but a bigger share of them arrive already doubting.
Segment trust by age and party, not by “the public”
Gallup’s combined 2023 to 2025 data shows trust is lowest in the middle of life. Americans 30 to 49 come in at 23%, adults 18 to 29 and 50 to 64 both at 28%, and those 65 and older at 43%. The partisan split inside age groups is wider still: in that same aggregate, Democrats 65 and older trusted the media at 69% while Republicans 30 to 49 sat at 6%.
Pew adds a sharper detail for younger audiences. Adults under 30 trust information from national news organizations (51%) about as much as information from social media sites (50%). For people over 50, those numbers diverge sharply. And in Pew’s September 2025 data, Republicans and Democrats trusted social media at the same 37%, one of the few places the parties match.
This is where most PR plans fall apart. A brand selling retirement services to affluent 70-year-olds can treat a national newspaper feature as a trust asset; its buyers are the most trusting cohort in the country. A brand selling to 35-year-old contractors in red counties should assume a national outlet name carries little weight with that buyer, and that the local paper, a trade publication or a creator they follow will do more. Same article, opposite value, depending on who reads it.
Before you build a media list, write down the age band and the political lean of the buyer you need to persuade. Then check each outlet against that profile instead of against its traffic.
What happens to media trust when AI starts answering the questions?
The newest variable in the 2026 data is the chatbot. The Reuters Institute found weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% in a year, with people under 25 at 17%, roughly three times the rate of the oldest group. Trust in the answers is low: 20% globally, and just 6% in the UK, the lowest of any market. Reuters also found chatbot users are much less likely to click through to the original source than people using Google Search.
That combination creates a strange incentive for brands. Fewer people will see your coverage in its original form. More of them will see a summary of it inside an AI answer. And the summary is only as credible as the sources the model chose to draw from. A brand quoted in a trusted outlet stands a better chance of being cited in that answer, and the outlet’s name travels with the citation. That is why AI search visibility (what the industry now calls AEO) starts with earned placements in publications the models already treat as reliable.
Creators are the other shift. Reuters found 27% of people get news from news-focused creators, rising to 46% when you count entertainment creators who sometimes discuss news. Only 3% rely solely on creators, though. For most audiences, creators add to traditional news rather than replacing it, which means a brand still needs the outlet placement as the anchor that creators, chatbots and customers all point back to.
Score every placement with the NEAR Score
Media trust statistics are only useful if they change what you pitch on Monday. The NEAR Score is a four-part model for ranking any outlet or story opportunity by how much trust it will actually transfer to your brand. Each letter gets zero to three points, for a maximum of 12.
N is Named voice. Does the story put a real, credentialed person on the record by name and title? A quote from “a company spokesperson” scores zero. A founder with a relevant track record scores two. A specialist with verifiable credentials the reader recognizes (a physician, an engineer, a CPA, a researcher) scores three. This dimension comes straight from Edelman’s finding that scientists and teachers out-trust every institution.
E is Earned editorial. Is the placement a reporter’s independent story, a contributed column under editorial review, a paid sponsored post, or a native ad? Independent reporting scores three. Bylined contributor content with real editing scores two. Clearly labeled sponsored content scores one. Anything readers might mistake for news but later discover was paid scores zero, because that discovery destroys more trust than the placement ever created.
A is Audience proximity. How close is the outlet to the buyer’s community, profession or beat? A local outlet in the buyer’s city, or the trade publication their industry reads, scores three. A regional or vertical outlet scores two. A general national outlet scores one. An outlet with no overlap with your buyer scores zero no matter how big it is. Pew’s local data and Muck Rack’s 78% community-relevance finding both justify weighting this dimension heavily.
R is Reader trust match. Does the outlet hold trust with your buyer’s age band and political lean, as measured by the Gallup, Pew and Reuters splits above? Three means the outlet is a known trusted source for that segment. Zero means your buyer’s segment distrusts it on sight.
Score your top 20 targets. Anything at nine or above goes to the top of the pitch calendar. Six to eight is worth pursuing when the story fits. Below six, skip it, even if the domain authority looks impressive, because you are buying reach with an audience that will discount it.
What the trust data means for your next pitch
Put these media trust statistics side by side and a clear pattern appears. Trust in the abstract media is low and volatile, from 25% to 54% depending on which survey and which country you read. Trust in specific outlets, local outlets and named experts holds up far better. That is the space earned media occupies, and paid advertising doesn’t.
An ad asks a reader to believe a brand about itself. An earned placement asks the reader to believe a journalist they already read, who chose to quote you. Even in a low-trust year, that second request is easier to grant, because the reader’s trust in a specific outlet they chose is a different thing from their trust in “the media.” The Reuters finding about widely used brands holding up is the strongest version of that argument in the 2026 data.
Newsrooms still need you, too. Muck Rack’s 2026 survey found 86% of journalists say at least some of their stories originate from PR pitches. The same survey found 88% immediately disregard pitches that miss their beat, and that the elements they value most are beat relevance, access to relevant sources, original research or data, and good images. Translated into practice: pitch fewer outlets, pitch them with a named expert and real data, and pitch the local or trade angle first.
You can run this scoring yourself in an afternoon, or hand it to a placement partner like Instant Press that works across 1,000+ publications. Either way, start from the buyer’s trust profile instead of from a list of famous mastheads. Rank outlets by the trust they carry with your buyer, put a credentialed human in the story, and treat every placement as a trust transfer rather than a traffic event.
So here is the question worth sitting with before your next campaign: if you scored your current media list with the NEAR Score today, how many of your dream outlets would actually clear a nine?