On the eve of the defamation trial that looms over Fox News’s journalistic and financial future, Fox took out full-page ads in the New York Times and The Washington Post. The ad suggests that Fox journalism is riding high. “Trusted Now,” the ad says in big letters. “More Than Ever.”
Below the headline is a chart comparing Fox to other TV news outlets, purportedly proving Fox’s big claim. But the data are easy to misread, and they come from a survey research organization that has come to an almost diametrically opposed conclusion about Fox in its other data.
More aptly, Fox is the outlet that the most people cite as being among their most trusted outlets. But on the whole, Americans have trusted it less than they trust plenty of others.
The Fox ad cites YouGov as its source. The data from the survey, listed in the ad as being from “YouGov Profiles+,” don’t appear to be public. YouGov hasn’t responded to requests for the data, and a Mediaite story on the numbers from late last week doesn’t link to them. Asked for the data, Fox pointed to a press release last week that contained a chart featuring the same numbers but little detail.
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But a mere look at the chart should give one pause. You’ll note that the numbers displayed add up to 148 percent. So this isn’t strictly about which one outlet is “most trusted.”
The description of the data in the ad, in fact, shows that the pollster asked about media outlets people watch and then “which do you most trust for news? Check as many as apply.” So 41 is the percentage of people who cited Fox as being among however many outlets they cited as being their most trusted.
You begin to see how this framing might make Fox look good. It is a go-to news source for conservative-leaning Americans, whereas left-leaning Americans split their choices among a number of other mainstream outlets.
We’ve seen this story before. A 2015 Quinnipiac University poll, for instance, showed Americans naming Fox as their most trusted news source more than they named any other outlet offered; this was because 58 percent of Republicans chose it, while Democrats were split more evenly among CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and MSNBC.
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This is about market share. And Fox has had the right-leaning portion of the market cornered for many years.
Beyond that, YouGov’s own data from last year paint a different picture.
In its 2022 “Trust in Media” survey for the Economist, YouGov offered a better framing of this question. It mentioned a number of media outlets, and it asked all Americans to offer an up-or-down vote on each one.
Fox did considerably worse by this measure.
While 30 percent of Americans considered it at least “trustworthy,” more than 4 in 10 labeled it “untrustworthy.” Its negative-14 split on trustworthiness vs. untrustworthiness was worse than every other TV news outlet, and it was also worse than 20 of the other 21 media outlets tested. Fox nipped only the conservative news site Breitbart, which came in at negative-15.
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Indeed, you could sure make an argument that Fox is actually the least trusted TV outlet, according to the same survey research organization.
The Quinnipiac data from 2015 also showed this. While Fox was the outlet the most people cited as being their most trusted, the 55 percent who said they trusted Fox’s journalistic coverage at least “somewhat” was less than the percentage of people who said the same about CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. Only MSNBC ranked lower than Fox by this measure — 52 percent said they trusted MSNBC at least “somewhat.”
In many ways, this is a reflection of what got Fox News in its current pickle, the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Text messages, emails and other documentation show Fox fretted extensively about losing its dominance among right-leaning and Trump-supporting viewers. So it took great pains to tailor its message to them, even as that meant floating bogus stolen-election theories that had been popular on Newsmax and One America News Network.
“We are not concerned with losing market share to CNN or MSNBC right now,” Fox executive Raj Shah wrote in a Nov. 10, 2020, email, as panic set in at Fox over its actions in calling the 2020 election for Joe Biden. “Our concern is Newsmax and One America News Network.”
The recipient of that email? YouGov employees whom Fox was asking about conducting a survey.
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