Republicans are more likely to say they trust President Donald Trump than to say they trust the media
According to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey, 81 percent of Republicans think the media wants Trump to fail. Only 5 percent of Republicans said they trusted the media “a great deal” to state facts fully and accurately, but 38 percent say they trust Trump and his administration to present facts fully and accurately.
A December 2016 poll revealed similar numbers among Trump voters, 56 percent of whom said they’d believe Trump over a national media outlet reporting he’d said something untrue.
Trump and his senior staffers have told a number of lies since he took the oath of office on Jan. 20. Just one day after his swearing-in ceremony, both Trump and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer insisted he had the largest inauguration crowd ever, a claim that is easily debunked.
When confronted about his statement on the inaugural crowd, Spicer argued the White House can “disagree with the facts.” Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to Trump, said Spicer “gave alternative facts” on the size of the crowd.
Trump gave false information about a number of topics during his first week in office, including saying he lost the popular vote because of widespread voter fraud, a claim supported by zero evidence.
Trump repeatedly bashed the media throughout his presidential campaign and has continued his war with reporters as president, targeting legitimate outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN as “fake news.”
Spicer even presented Trump as a victim of the media in a press conference last week, saying that when the media reports facts about the Trump administration, it’s always “demoralizing.”
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Jan. 25-27 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
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