Most Trusted New Sources in 2025

Since Donald Trump entered the political scene in 2015, trust in legacy media institutions has declined, a trend that continued throughout his first term as president. While trust in media fell to near all-time lows in the post-COVID era, the latest poll suggests it has now stabilized, with the most significant gains in trust and consumption coming from social media and video platforms.

In the latest YouGov poll, taken May 11-12 with 2,211 U.S. adults, respondents were split on the trustworthiness of news: 32% said news is trustworthy, while 33% said it is untrustworthy. People were more favorable toward the news they personally consume, with 52% saying it is trustworthy and only 12% saying it is untrustworthy.

Respondents were then asked which outlets they trusted most. At the top of the list of most trustworthy was the omniscient Weather Channel, followed by government-supported media outlets BBC and PBS, at +26 and +25 net trustworthiness respectively.

Other major newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and legacy networks NBC and CBS, found themselves in the middle of the pack, with net trust ratings between +10 and +20. More partisan brands, such as CNN, MSNBC, National Review, and Fox News scored between 0 and +10. Only a few outlets had negative net trust, and all of them were overtly partisan, including Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Al Jazeera, and HuffPost. (RealClearPolitics was not included in the survey.)

Importantly, despite widespread attention on media trustworthiness from figures ranging from President Trump to Jon Stewart, trust in the majority of outlets surveyed actually increased compared with the same poll taken last year, most with marginal 1- to 4-point increases in trust. The most significant changes were a 5-point decrease in trust in the Washington Post, likely due to the increased perception of influence by owner Jeff Bezos, and a 10-point increase for Fox News, which rose from -10 to net 0.

Democrats continued to express higher trust in most outlets, with net positive trust in 44 of the 52 news organizations studied; Republicans had net positive trust in only 21. This partisan gap may reflect a broader perception found in the poll: 30% of respondents said news sources are generally liberal, while 25% described them as moderate and 13% as conservative.

Even as overall trust in news changed little, and arguably improved, the major shift over the last few years and the 2025 election concerns the platforms being used. After Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, she doubled down on TikTok and short-form media, which had not been prominent in previous presidential campaigns. Trump also had a TikTok presence but emphasized appearances on various podcasts. These podcast episodes received hundreds of millions of views and were clipped and shared widely on TikTok and Instagram, generating hundreds of millions more views.

This rise in video and social media platforms was reflected in the data. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they consumed news on social media, up from 54% in 2024. Podcast consumption increased from 19% of respondents to 23%, while print newspaper readership fell from 16% to 13%. The increased use of social media also coincided with higher trust in those platforms: YouTube rose from +1 to +12 net trust, X.com from -18 to -15, and TikTok from -35 to -26.