Media, Politics, Science

Survey: BBC and FOX Are Most Trusted TV News Brands In U.S.

200px-bbcsvg180px-Foxnewslogo.svgA survey  by Research Intelligencer by Brand Keys found that BBC, Fox News and PBS are the most-trusted TV news brands in the U.S.  The survey covered over 4,000 news viewers.  It is most interesting that BBC can in first in the United States — a well-deserved distinction for the venerable news organization but a bit of an embarrassment for U.S. media.

BBC came in first with 90 percent of those surveyed.

Fox News and PBS came in second and third with 87 percent and 86 percent respectively.

download-11.jpgNotably, Bloomberg came in fourth with 81 percent and MSNBC came in fifth with 80 percent. They were followed by CBS, NBC, and ABC in that order.  In a blow to CNN, which has a motto as the “most trusted names in news”.  CNN came in 9th at 70 percent and almost tied with Sinclair at 69 percent. CNN has covered the conservative-leaning Sinclair with some tough commentary.

It is extraordinary that the British Broadcasting Corporation can now claim to be the most trusted name in news in the United States.

 

106 thoughts on “Survey: BBC and FOX Are Most Trusted TV News Brands In U.S.”

        1. Maybe CNN will have some viewers left on which they can collect demographic data.

          1. For the record, Spastic, I don’t have cable. CNN and MSNBC mean nothing to me. No obligation to defend them.

        2. Peter,…
          The numbers I’ve seen indicate that the average, or the median, age of TV news viewers is way up there.
          If it’s 65 at Fox and 61 at CNN or MSNBC, that’s an indication that younger viewers aren’t tuning in to TV news.
          If these numbers are halfway accurate, it’s an indication that ALL TV news viewership is aging.

    2. I don’t know how closely you read that article, Peter.
      It confirms what I just said in my previous comment.

      1. Yes, Tom, I saw that. Millennials are getting their news from “The Daily Show” and social media.

  2. Here’s A Media-Related Story:

    TRUMP RAMPS UP VOLUME OF FALSE CLAIMS

    It turns out that’s when the president decided to turn on the spigots of false and misleading claims. As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.

    That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day.

    When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing the longer Trump stays in office. In fact, in June and July, the president averaged 16 claims a day.

    Put another way: In his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has almost doubled that total.

    Our award-winning interactive graphic, created with the help of Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Washington Post’s graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. We have updated the graphic to allow readers to see the number of claims on a daily or monthly basis.

    On July 5, the president reached a new daily high of 79 false and misleading claims. On a monthly basis, June and July rank in first and second place, with 532 and 446 claims, respectively.

    Edited from: “Analysis: Trump Has Made 4,229 False Or Misleading Claims In 558 Days”

    Todays WASHINGTON POST

  3. Pathetic, misleading reporting. Professor Turley you are an embarrassment to the teaching of law and the law itself by this ignorant account.

  4. here is what i like most about BBC. they pick a lot of news stories up from around the Commonwealth. You can barely get the kinds of stories they covered heard at all in the US press.

    Here is what I don’t like. It’s an arm of British Imperial propaganda and you can read that between every line.

    I catch it on satellite radio on late night NPR and online.

    Fox, is tv based, and I don’t like TV so i see it rarely.

    not sure about all the tv stuff, likewise

    one more thing. RT is great. Yes here is a good one they are covering the US press is ignoring

    https://www.rt.com/business/429864-south-africa-boers-farmers/

  5. All news operations have to work hard to neutralize their bias. For a starter, they should run with “counter-narrative” news stories as being disruptive to complacent, simplistic thought patterns. When Charles Evers endorses Trump for President, CNN should run with it to “dent” the narrative that Trump is disliked by all black Americans. Second, they should begin to bring their news selection process out into the open, by writing a published standard of newsworthiness, and allowing the audience to critique it.

  6. The media should take note that it has lost the public’s trust. It used to report straight news, and separated op-ed. Now everything’s an op-ed, and the media carefully crafts how it presents the news to form public opinion. That is not its job.

    1. KarenS – 99% of my friends who are staunch Dems get their news from MSNBC. Did you catch the “Occupy Lafeyette Park” protest last week? At one point they were actually chanting “Rachel Maddow, Rachel Maddow” Bizarre.

    2. I agree! I found that hard to believe. The Hill is left leaning so no surprise there if the study was fudged..

  9. To get an idea of objective news reporting, one has to step back from the news. In Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and the US, there are newspapers that are extensions of a political party or ideal. They vary in degrees of ‘slant’ and all have to report the stuff that goes on. Fox may be seen as a ‘trusted’ name in news but only because half of the population of the US is conservative and enjoys hearing about how progressives get ‘slammed’ instead of having taken issue with. Fox sometimes simply doesn’t report news when it is too illustrative of what an idiot Trump is or some other Republicans are. If you read Fox News and compare it with the NY Times or the Washington Post, you get a conservative rag that is mostly tabloid. The NY Times and the WAPO are clearly left leaning but primarily in their opinion sections; for a joke read the Washington Times.

    The BBC and Reuters are as close to the objective news as you can get in the US. NPR is a progressive rag but without the opinion and tabloid filler.

    To get a balanced idea of how America is split, read the NY Times/WAPO and then read Fox News. Omit the opinion sections on both and edit out the ‘slams’ and ‘targets’. Sometimes the news cannot be escaped.

    For objective news the BBC is the best, along with Reuters and Le Monde International.

    To interpret this poll, however, one must factor in that regardless of the ‘slant’ in the opinion pages, and regardless of how objectively a story is presented, if one’s side comes off poorly, then the newspaper is obviously biased.

    1. You say, “Read Fox News”. The Fox News audience, from what I can tell, is functionally illiterate which is why they watch many hours of TV daily. They are essentially unable to read. They enjoy the emotional outbursts and loud arguments about things that are marginally related to current events. Measuring the Fox audience is measuring the numbers of functionally illiterate US residents.

      The survey is grossly distorted because literate folks don’t watch much TV. Literate folks get their news from newspapers and scholarly journals – paper and electronic.

      1. Here’s Chris P. Bacon with the latest manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

        2. This is interesting. Not sure if I have seen that graph before. It would suggest that every time we learn something new, we would think in the beginning, that we were an expert in what we are learning. Then as we keep going our confidence would drop.

      2. “The Fox News audience, from what I can tell, is functionally illiterate which is why they watch many hours of TV daily. They are essentially unable to read.”

        This is a great example of the bigotry and intolerance that has helped fuel the #WalkAway movement.

        1. Karen: Are any studies being conducted to see how many Democrats have been convinced to ‘Walkaway’ by Walkaway?

          I had a long debate on the thread of a Walkaway post on Facebook. They were just lame Trumpers and Russian trolls. No one any Democrat would pay attention to.

        2. Karen…Exactly! I can’t believe they have not figured that out….but then again……

    2. issac – take the front pages of WaPo and NYT and circle the “loaded words” in each article. I am sure you would agree that the front page should be just news. Also, see how far down do they bury the lede. I stopped listening to NPR when Click and Clack got political. That is how bad it is in public radio.

      I used to take the lead article for the New Times and have my student find all the loaded words in the article and then decide if the author was actually a neutral observer or not. They never were. 😉

      1. I used to love PBS and NPR. Publicly funded programs should be unbiased. It was great venue to bring the arts and children’s programs to the public for free. I stopped listening to NPR when every program had such a severe bigotry against conservatives. I do not think the federal government should pay so much money for free Democratic Party advertising and propaganda. If NPR wants public money, then it must be non political.

        1. The production values and story selection are good, but NPR at any rate has always used a gentry Democratic lens. The first President of the network had been George McGovern’s campaign manager. I’d refer you to Fred Barnes take down of their Central America reporting, published more than 30 years ago. PBS used to be better than it is. I’d attribute that to a generational shift among journalists. MacNell and then Lehrer retired.

      2. P

        Like I wrote, most newspapers are slanted left or right, in the US; in other countries they tend to be a reflection of a major political party. In the US, our oligarchy, there are really no political parties, just polarities that are orchestrated to keep the chaos and ignorance in full profile. That way Americans think they are choosing a representative that reflects their ideology when in actuality they are simply picking one of two choices provided them by the mega rich, corporations, and special interests. So, read with a filter, filter out the bias. Unfortunately most readers, left and right, filter in the bias.

    3. BBC is government propaganda just like RT. But, they cover a wide array of stories, which is good, as does RT.

      1. You are most welcome Paul =) Thanx for recommending that Netflix – looking forward to watching it.

  11. Highly Misleading Headline

    The numbers generated are not for how trusted a network is in the United States overall. The numbers are for how trusted the network is among its own regular viewers.

    For the TV brands analyzed here, 4,012 viewers rated broadcast and cable brands that they watch regularly (3+ times per week) to determine how much trust those brands engendered. [emphasis added]

    It is hardly surprising that someone who watches a network’s news more than three times a week trusts that network’s news. Why else would they regularly watch it?

    This is especially true of cable stations as people with cable often have more options and predictably go with those they personally trust. In a small market with limited choice (e.g. broadcast networks and Sinclair stations in areas not well served by cable) that may not apply because it’s the only game in town.

    https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/322934/tvs-most-trusted-news-brands.html

    1. Thanks. I thought there was something sketchy about this survey. A follow up question would be why Sinclair Media is included in this survey. There is no ‘Sinclair Evening News”. Sinclair is like Ziff-Davis – it owns a mess of local stations and other media properties. It produces some syndicated content but producing content is not its core business.

    2. I guess it does still tell us something about the viewers though. Yes, I watch it, but I don’t trust what they are telling me. Or, does it say that a FOX watcher is more open to watching MSNBC vs. a MSNBC viewer watching FOX? Meaning that there are more FOX viewers who would watch MSNBC and say they don’t trust it over MSNBC viewers set in their ways and won’t even watch FOX.

  12. What is a “liberal” these days? Someone who likes free speech? Or free food stamps? There is a difference. One may like the first catagory but not the second. Yet where was FDR? Times have changed. Conservatives are not like Barry Goldwater these days. No one these days is all the way with LBJ.
    I am a liberal conservative. I like free speech and don’t like housing projects.

  13. I would rank PBS first. The BBC show is “too Brit”. CNN deserves to be ranked low. FOX is fairly good. MSNBC is good. Some of the business shows or channels are good. The Nightly Business Report is an NBC thing which is shown on PBS as well. Good people give the news there and it is not only about business or finance. Sunday morning still has some weekly roundup shows. Chuck Todd stinks. He said Ferguson was a “Ghetto”. The viewership for Sunday morning news has slid down. Fareek Zackara or howevr ya spull it has a very good Sunday morning news show. Nightly news: PBS iNewshour s first in my choice and then Nightly Business Report 60 Minutes is a good show. The original networks: ABC, CBS, NBC have gone down over the years. NBC has some good offshoots like MSNBC. FOX has some goofballs but overall it “covers news” well. Hannity seems to be “in league” with Trump but he is okl On PBS the best narrator is Hari Shreenavasa or however ya spull it.

  14. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/the-aps-war-on-donald-trump-voter-id-edition.php

    One of the grossly amusing elements of our time is the insistence by employees of organizations that were once nonaligned that these organizations take sides. It happens again and again. First it was higher education, then professional associations, then elements of the news media. Now it’s professional sports and the Boy Scouts. The left never sleeps and it behaves like a bunch of parasitoid wasps. This will not end well, because it is putting the rest of society in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

    1. It s not the Boy Scouts anymore. its the LGBTQ+ Girls f/k/a Boy Scouts n/k/a “Scouts”

  15. Are you telling me that between 69% and 90% of respondents say they ‘trust’ these networks? Did the surveyors ask how often they ever looked at any broadcasts from these networks? Is Sinclair a news brand? How many viewers have even heard of Sinclair much less name any media properties the company owns?

  16. In the same survey, President Trump was rated as trusted by only 29% of respondents. Even the Fox News crowd is starting to disbelieve him!

  17. This is a huge embarrassment as over in the UK the BBC is considered a hugely biased and unreliable new source the bleats propaganda, deals in talking heads and no longer spreads news but partakes in brainwashing.

    1. Bradato Kopelo – have you seen the mockumentary WIA? It shows what a joke the BBC is.

      1. 4 decades ongoing unchecked since the anti social Right-tard Reagan/Thatcher all Murdochized fakestream TV.

        Quote ex-BBC True Brit broadcaster the late John Peel’s last interview last lines (Indie On Sunday, Aug 29 ’04), “Rupert Murdoch has destroyed most of what was good about this country.”

        And, quote ex-MSNBC mainman Olbermann, “Al-Qaeda hurts us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us!”

        http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-bbc-is-on-murdoch-s-side

        http://johnpilger.com/articles/welcome-to-the-world-s-first-murdochracy

        1. Tina Willis – watch WIA – the first 3 seasons are available on Netflix. You will never look at the vaunted BBC the same way again.

      2. A disenfranchied minority of millions of TRUE Brits & Yanks never believe anything AngLOW fakestream, BBCrap, FauX Noize, or Pie-in-The-SKY.

        Since the anti social 19Hateys Right-tards Reagan & Thatcher unleashed the unelected ALIEN Monarch Mad Dog Murdoch for lynch-mob ratings, profit, and votes – to RULE their so called ‘Democracy’.

  18. Interesting, but not really any surprise. Now we wait for the Democrats on here to come in with how biased and incorrect the survey was. Waiting on it… Five, four, three, two, one…

    1. … and its five six seven, what are we shouting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Viet Nam! And its five six seven , open up the Pearly Gates. Aint not time to wonder why… whoopee we’re all gonna ….

    1. Paul – Not a blow at all but a reflection of the truth. Given the number of people that believe everything they see on Fox (or MSNBC), it’s surprising that any of the networks finished as high as they did, given the people that also believe nothing on some of the networks.

      1. who cares what people like, anyways

        what do you like enigma?

        yesterday i got a run down from Lien on the 20 journals a day it reads and the 325 or so websites it reads or something liek that. how bout you?

        1. I don’t read 20 Journals daily although I probably get highlights from about 10. The Wall Street Journal, National Review, MSNBC, Fox News, The Hill, The Atlantic, I listen to a lot of BBC on NPR on my way to work and back, The Root, The AAMBC Journal (where I’m also a contributor) I’m sure I’ve missed a few or the regulars.

    2. Liberals like a blow. But not when on the job. Conservatives prefer a roll in the hay but not during the day. Neither will pay a dime for a mere rhyme. That would be all the time.

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