Trust in TV News Reaches All Time Low, Can Bari Weiss Fix It?

This will be a defining year for the future of TV news.

High-stakes midterm elections, what’s next for the “Donroe Doctrine” after the shocking Venezuela raid and a general sense of chaotic energy means that every day will mean there’s a big story to cover.

But that increasingly important news cycle comes as Americans’ trust in media has collapsed to an all-time low of 28 percent, according to Gallup, which has been tracking that critical question since 1972. That is down from 40 percent in 2020, and far, far, below the all-time high of 72 percent in 1976.

And that core problem: The lack of trust in the media, appears to be at the center of Bari Weiss’ reinvention plans at CBS News. Weiss is expected to lay out her vision more explicitly in the coming weeks, but the past few weeks have given a little preview of what to expect.

“Right now, the majority of Americans say they do not trust the press. It isn’t because they’re crazy,” Weiss told CBS News staff in a Christmas Eve memo defending her (now widely-discussed) decision to hold a 60 Minutes segment. “To win back their trust, we have to work hard. Sometimes that means doing more legwork. Sometimes it means training our attention on topics that have been overlooked or misconstrued. And sometimes it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.”

Or as her hand-picked new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil put it in a Jan. 1 introductory video: “A lot has changed since the first person sat in this chair. But for me, the biggest difference is people do not trust us like they used to. And it’s not just us. It’s all of legacy media,” Dokoupil said in his video, adding that anger from consumers about topics like the Iraq war, Hillary Clinton’s emails, COVID lockdowns and Hunter Biden’s laptop underscored how skewed the nature of coverage was in favor of political and academic elites and away from the concerns of normal people.

“So here’s my promise to you today and every time you see me in this chair: You come first,” he added. “Not advertisers. Not politicians. Not corporate interests. And, yes, that does include the corporate owners of CBS. I report for you.”

Weiss’ biggest innovation so far may be that she is saying publicly and loudly what executives and news anchors across the industry have long been saying privately: The rapid decline in media trust is a bad thing and requires a major intervention and reinvention, though the prescription to repair that frayed trust remains frustratingly unclear for now.

Top network news executives and journalists are bothered by the fact that an overwhelming majority of Republicans don’t trust them, and that a smaller but still significant majority of independents don’t trust them, as both Pew and Gallup have repeatedly shown in their annual measures of trust in the media. And there have been no shortage of ideas on how to repair that relationship, at the very least with independents.

CBS News is a good example. Paramount CEO David Ellison has repeatedly said that he wants CBS News to appeal to the majority of people who identify not as far to the right nor far to the left, you could call them a “mushy majority,” both because of their relatively lack of strong political convictions, but also their historic unwillingness to watch news programming outside of major breaking news events.

“While it was founded with the mission of informing the public and fostering discussion on the issues of the day, too often it has become a platform that amplifies the very partisanship tearing our society apart,” Paramount CEO David Ellison wrote staff, when announcing his deal to bring Weiss into the company through the acquisition of The Free Press. “George Washington warned that the primary danger in politics is partisanship. Today, that danger extends far beyond politics – threatening the fabric of our communities. When we reduce every issue to ‘us vs. them’ or ‘my way vs. the wrong way,’ we close ourselves off from listening, learning, and ultimately growing, both as individuals and as a society.”

Can Weiss persuade people who currently don’t watch the news to tune in? Or will she attempt to steal viewers from Fox, CNN or ABC, given the zero-sum nature of TV viewership? Bringing CBS News’ morning and evening shows back from the brink will require one or the other.

Of course, it is a pursuit that others have attempted. When he took over CNN, Chris Licht made it clear that he felt a vast swath of America was not being served by the channel. That led to town halls featuring high-profile conservatives (like the now-infamous Donald Trump town hall), and more conservative voices to counterbalance perceived left-leaning voices on CNN panels. The result of that experiment was some loyal CNN viewers leaving, and few if any new viewers tuning in.

Most cable news channels have a clear sense of who their audience is, and who they are. Fox News and MS NOW both have defined brands, and cater to clearly-defined audiences (both also love to tout the surprisingly large viewership each has with people who identify as members of the “other” political party, MS NOW with its Republican viewers, and Fox News with its Democratic viewers), though in a world defined by intense political polarization, the old metrics of partisan identification may not hold as much weight as they once did.

CNBC, too, knows exactly what it is: It’s audience is smaller, but vastly influential, from the Oval Office to the C-suite, landing it big scoops and newsmaking interviews. CNN president Mark Thompson is now trying to hold CNN’s mass audience appeal as a go-to destination for when world news breaks (like the Maduro operation) but also refashion the brand as a premium product akin to The New York Times with subscription add-ons like he once did running the business side of the newspaper company.

It is the broadcast network news divisions and CNN which seem not clearly defined in today’s hyper-polarized and hyper-splintered media environment. Formerly the most mass of mass media, it is hard for any of them to claim to speak for a majority of Americans. (In Nielsen’s latest weekly ratings rankings snapshot, ABC’s World News Tonight garnered 7.5 million viewers, NBC Nightly News hit 6.2 million and CBS Evening News hit 3.8 million in the holiday-impacted frame.)

NBC News in October launched a new branding campaign, one that on the surface bears a striking resemblance to what Weiss seems keen to bring to CBS. With the tagline “Reporting for America,” the network wants to take a less hyperbolic and more thoughtful approach to the news.

“Over the past few months, we’ve been listening closely to Americans, and what we’ve heard is clear. People are not disinterested in news. Rather, they are hungry for civil discourse and trustworthy reporting that can empower them to make up their own minds. Exactly what NBC News stands for,” NBC News Group chief Cesar Conde told staff at the time.

Dokoupil, too, has spoken about helping viewers make up their own minds, with his CBS Evening News dedicating one of its five core principles to that very issue.

“We respect you. We believe that our fellow Americans are smart and discerning. It’s our job to present you with the fullest picture — and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue,” the show said. “We trust you to make up your own minds, and to make the decisions that are best for you, your families and your communities.”

CNN chief Thompson has also made similar comments, saying “I don’t,” when asked whether he trusts the media at a Semafor conference earlier this year.

“I’m a journalist, I have spent my entire life questioning news sources and trying to compare news sources and trying to figure out what I should believe and what I shouldn’t believe,” he said. “I think I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience which is deferential to media.”

Of course, you need an audience in the first place before you can worry about how questioning or deferential they really are.

Chats with multiple executives and journalists suggest that the path forward for TV news may be to directly guide viewers in things that are meaningful to their everyday lives. Less horserace political coverage, and more coverage about why they may be paying more for beef at the grocery store, or less for gas at the pump, and how that connects to the larger world of policy.

But there are only so many stories that impact people’s real lives on a day-to-day basis, and the midterms could present a return-to-horserace form as networks appeal to the news junkies that eat that coverage up, even if it comes at the expense of inconsistent news viewers who may be actively turned off by the coverage.

And leaders need to project a level of independence, both from corporate ownership (another area Dokoupil highlighted) as well as political leadership. President Trump is an avid news consumer, and has pressed media executives (including Ellison) on changes he’d like to see. Weiss and every other executive will need to remind viewers that they aren’t doing the bidding of the U.S. government at the same time they make editorial decisions in search of a broader audience that could be reasonably interpreted as benefitting the government.

It’s a real catch-22: You need to change to try and bring in that broader audience, but no TV network can afford to lose the audience they already have.

For now, Dokoupil, Tom Llamas, and every other national news anchor will need to decide how they inform an America that doesn’t currently trust what they say, and what they need to do to win that back, a particularly challenging problem given the partisan rancor that seems to define the current culture.

But it will be the big story of 2026, as NBC News, MS NOW, CNN and likely others (like CBS) try to get their direct-to-consumer offerings off the ground, and try to reverse a long-decline in linear TV ratings. Fox Nation has a couple million subscribers with super-fan content, and Fox One is on its way thanks to live sports, but a true TV news-focused subscription is still uncharted waters.

This year the question of trust in the media and the future of the media business will be more intertwined than people think.

In an interview for Good Morning America’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, Robin Roberts explained how she approaches the issue.

“We’re very proud of our profession, and we understand exactly what you’re saying, that there is mistrust, and so you have to build that trust. And the way we do it is being consistent, is being authentic, not sugarcoating things,” she said. “Sometimes you have no control over how people are going to receive the accurate information that you’re giving them, they’re going to use it or not use it, but we have no control over that. But we do have control over checking our facts, knowing our intentions are right and pure, knowing we have no agenda other than to give people the unfiltered truth period.”

Just how big the market is for that unfiltered truth and consistency remains to be seen, but CBS, NBC, CNN and others are going to give it a try.