Last month, The Hollywood Reporter ran a long story revealing data from a study conducted by Morning Consult on their behalf. The subject was an important one in this era of political polarization and sinking trust in media. The title says it all: “America’s Most Trusted News Anchors in the Trump Era Are…”
The study was conducted among just over 2,200 adults in the U.S. in August. The claim is “nationally representative,” which is a fudge term, but in the 2020s, we’ll go with it.
So why don’t I have any trust in the survey about trust? It’s simple. We know that fewer and fewer Americans watch the early evening national newscasts or the network morning shows. Despite the recent Kimmel kerfuffle and Colbert’s pending cancellation, both of which have goosed their audiences, the late-night ratings remain low by historical standards.
Despite that, large majorities of the survey respondents knew these people, which I find hard to believe. The results are reported in three pieces: “trust a lot or some,” “trust not much or not at all,” and the “don’t know/no opinion” group. Apparently, a four-point scale was used, and the top two groups went into the first bucket (“trust a lot” and “trust some”), while the next two (“not much trust” and “don’t trust at all”) fell into the next bucket.
Here’s my concern: of the numbers reported, the largest “don’t know/no opinion” number was 33%, and that was for Jeffrey Goldberg, who is listed as PBS/The Atlantic. Do you believe that a survey of Americans would find that 67% know who Jeffrey Goldberg is? I vaguely know who he is, but I also think he may have been one of my classmates from Hebrew School in 1965.
A few other choice results: Tom Llamas had been the anchor of NBC Nightly News for less than three months when the survey was fielded. He’s been at NBC News for a while, but would you accept that 80% of the U.S. population knows who he is and can offer an answer on his trustworthiness?
The CBS Evening News pair, Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson, which also started in 2025, didn’t fare quite as well as Llamas, but around 75% of the U.S. knows who they are, according to Morning Consult.
For me, the survey doesn’t pass the smell test. Either there was an undisclosed screen in the survey —something like “Do you watch network newscasts, morning news, late-night talk shows, etc.?” — or perhaps respondents were told something to the effect of “Even if you have only heard the name, answer what comes to mind.”
By way of comparison, NPR has put out some recent articles citing polls the organization sponsors with Marist University and PBS. If you go to Marist’s site, you can click on the “Survey Data” button to see almost anything you want to know, including a solid description of methodology and the results broken out in many ways. While I’m sure most people won’t go there, this gets my personal seal of approval.
The point here is to always question results and be aware of how a questionnaire was designed. Some months ago, just before public broadcasting’s federal funding was pulled, I wrote about a Pew study that purported to show support for public broadcasting. I suggested one of the questions was conflated but praised Pew for their transparency. If you visited their site, you could see just about all the details except the actual questionnaire—much like the Marist survey for NPR/PBS.
I’ll admit to responding to surveys for a combination of curiosity and frequent flyer miles. I answer honestly, but this is sort of a “busman’s holiday” for me. Some of the questionnaires are well-written, while others leave me scratching my head.
I’ve filled out surveys about the image of companies I know very little about beyond the name, under the heading of “Just give your impression.” Fine — my impression of the company’s management, how it treats its employees, and what it’s doing for the environment is “I have no freaking idea.” I was asked if I had heard of the company, and my answer was “yes.” That’s it. Yet some company will pay for the results and possibly take action. You can’t go wrong asking questions of those who ask the questions.
Let’s meet again next week.
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