A new poll shows that more Americans trust CNN than they do President Donald Trump. In its latest poll, Survey Monkey found that 50 percent of adults said they trusted CNN more than Trump, whereas 43 percent trust the commander in chief more than the cable news channel, reported Axios. Other media outlets enjoyed an even greater trust advantage. When it comes to the Washington Post and New York Times, for example, the trust advantage was nine percentage points and 11 points when it came to networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.
The online poll of 4,965 adults also puts on stark display just how divided the country is when it comes to whom people trust. Almost 9 in 10 Republicans say they trust Trump more than CNN, whereas 91 percent of Democrats say they trust the cable news channel more than the president. When it comes to independents, the division is a bit more even, with 55 percent saying they trust CNN more and 40 percent trust the president.
The survey shows that there’s little risk of Trump alienating his Republican base with his controversial tweets, but the standing among independents is a reason for concern. “Not only do most Republicans approve of his use of Twitter, but asked to describe those tweets, the No. 1 mention among the GOP is ‘truthful,’ with ‘entertaining’ in second place,” Jon Cohen, Survey Monkey’s senior vice president for research, said. “[T]he biggest danger for Republicans is that they grow content with firing up the base: Fully three-quarters of pure independents (those that don’t lean one way or the other) disapprove of Trump’s tweeting, and their top three descriptors for it are ‘undignified,’ ‘mean,’ and ‘dishonest’.”
This survey comes on the heels of the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll that also showed similar partisan divisions, noting that only 30 percent of Americans have some degree of trust in the media, a number that plunges to 9 percent among Republicans. A little more than 6 in 10 Americans also say they don’t really trust the Trump administration.
