Trust in legacy media continues to decline, according to Megan Brenan at Gallup:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.

Meanwhile, seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%).

“Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.” October 2, 2025

The continuing decline is hardly news any more. It’s tempting to simply say that it’s happening because the legacy media are untrustworthy.

True. But do you trust Facebook? X? Tik Tok? See what I mean?

Here’s a clue about what’s really happening

The loss of trust is mostly among the young:

There is a clear generational divide in trust in the media that has grown particularly stark over the past decade, according to an analysis of three-year aggregated data to increase sample sizes. In the most recent three-year period, spanning 2023 to 2025, 43% of adults aged 65 and older trust the media, compared with no more than 28% in any younger age group. “28% in U.S.”

That is because younger people are simply paying less attention to legacy media.

Consider, for example, the underlying story around TV comic Jimmy Kimmel, who caught heat for remarks about the Charlie Kirk shooting. Most of his audience is Boomers anyway.

Young people today are not waiting up for a late night comic to tell them how to think. And they won’t start doing that later in life either. They have many disparate, online resources to choose from. Truth is, they hardly know the legacy media they don’t trust.

The resources younger people rely on may or may not be reliable. But they do not have a hammerlock hold on their entire demographic. That’s all gone now, simply because the amount of capital needed to gain many thousands of followers (and a living) is proportionally much less now than formerly.

Straw in the wind:

The @washingtonpost has fired writer & editor @mffisher along with 15 other columnists & editors. Marc Fisher spent 39 years at WaPo and is one of the greatest voices and reporters our city has. Democracy Dies In Darkness and the Washington Post is turning out the lights.

Apparently, NBC’s Mark Segraves equates the health of democracy in general with the health of the Washington Post. The reality is pretty much the opposite. Today, you do not need to be a billionaire like Post owner Jeff Bezos to have a social media reach that rivals that of a Post opinion columnist.

The internet really did change everything.