A newly released Gallup poll has found that the level of trust that Americans place in mainstream media has reached yet another new low.

The survey revealed that just 31% of respondents say they have a “‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the mass media [defined as “newspapers, TV and radio”] to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly.’” The number fell slightly from last year’s number of 32%, which was a historic low at that point. Gallup further noted that for the third year in a row, “more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount.”

According to Gallup’s polling, Americans’ trust in the media has been steadily falling since the mid-1970s, taking a particularly precipitous fall in 2016 when it dipped below 40% for the first time, bottoming out at 32%. The number rose slightly over the next two years but has steadily dropped over the past six years, reaching an all-time low this year.

Recent events suggest that Americans’ confidence in the media is unlikely to recover anytime soon. Following the airing of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Sunday, Johnson posted on X side-by-side clips of what CBS aired versus the speaker’s full answers, which showed that CBS had selectively edited key parts of Johnson’s answers on FEMA’s lack of funding for hurricane survivors and efforts that states are making to clean up voter rolls to prevent non-citizens from being allowed to vote. 

“CBS has been under fire for selectively editing their interviews to PROMOTE Democrats and UNDERMINE Republicans,” Johnson noted. “Yesterday, they chose to cut FIVE important minutes out of my nearly 15 minute interview.”

The controversy comes amidst the continued fallout over CBS News’s “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris this month, which observers say appeared to be heavily edited. As reported by The Daily Wire, the original interview was 45 minutes long, but only 15 minutes of the interview was publicly aired.

Controversy arose when a response from Harris appeared to have been completely excised from the original interview. A promotional clip posted online by CBS showed Harris responding in vague terms to host Bill Whitaker’s question about U.S. financial support for Israel’s war against Islamist terror groups. “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris said.

But when the full interview was posted on YouTube, Harris’s answer did not appear in it, nor did it appear in the “Overtime” segment. Instead, a different response to Whitaker’s question appeared, with Harris saying, “We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

Public outrage over the apparent deception seems to havereached a head, as a new Harvard Caps Harris poll found that a full 85% of voters — including 88% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats — say that CBS News should release the full, unedited transcript of the interview.

Jared Bridges, editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand, observed that adherence to political ideology within legacy media outlets seems to have surpassed concerns about objectivity.

“I’m sure there’s variance, but I suspect most mainstream media still think that they care about trustworthiness, but many of them have either lost their mooring or they are anchored to an ideology that doesn’t care as much about truth,” he told TWS. “That adherence to worldviews which value outcomes above truth certainly affects how one writes, edits, and presents newsworthy events.”