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Plummeting Public Trust, Mass Layoffs: Is Legacy Media Becoming Irrelevant?

Demonstrators attend the Save the Post rally outside The Washington Post offices on Thursday, February 5, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

The American people’s confidence in mass media appears to be continuing its spiral downward, according to the results of a new Pew Research Center survey. The poll found that 57% of the public has little or no confidence “in journalists to act in the best interests of the public.”

Some conservatives are pointing to dwindling public trust and legacy media layoffs as the last gasp of a dying empire, but analysts say, “Not so fast.”

The Pew poll results, released Wednesday, revealed that just 6% of Americans have “a great deal of confidence” that journalists have the public’s best interest in mind, with 37% having “a fair amount of confidence” (the total of 43% who say they have confidence in journalism is down from 47% in last year’s Pew survey).

Meanwhile, 40% said they had “not too much confidence” and 17% had “no confidence at all” in journalistic integrity. Notably, Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents (61%) were over twice as likely to say they had confidence in journalists than Republicans and GOP leaners (25%).

The Pew results are the latest in a steady stream of polls that indicate a growing distrust of the mainstream media. An October 2025 Gallup poll found that only 28% of Americans say they trust legacy outlets a “great deal” or a “fair amount” to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly, which was down from 31% the previous year.

When Gallup began polling on the question of Americans’ trust in mass media in 1972, around 70% of respondents said that they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust. The number steadily declined over the next 50 years, dropping 42 percentage points.

The public’s plunging confidence in journalist integrity of mass media and a shifting digital media landscape have sharply impacted the readership of legacy outlets. Over the last decade, Pew found that those who say they follow the news closely has dropped from 51% to 36%.

In addition, online traffic to the nation’s top 100 newspapers has dropped by 45% over the last four years. The evaporating readership led The Washington Post, the nation’s third-largest newspaper, to lay off over 300 journalists last week, amounting to about 30% of its workforce. Other legacy media behemoths like NBC News have also made significant cuts to their staff in recent months.

Do these ominous signs point to the impending downfall of the mainstream media? Conservative digital outlets, which have exploded in number, readership, and influence over the last two decades, have been predicting the demise of legacy media for years, citing heavy left-wing bias, the mass layoffs, and the loss of public trust via the spreading of outright lies through the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, Russiagate, COVID, the George Floyd/BLM riots, the Joe Biden senility coverup, and more.

While all of this may be true, it is likely a bit premature to pronounce the death of legacy media. As veteran journalist and columnist Becket Adams pointed out in a recent National Review article, major outlets like The New York Times, the Post, and NBC, ABC, and CBS “still have institutional heft, power, and at least some perceived credibility, even if it’s not now what it once was.” Adams points to the recent fraud scandal involving Minnesota’s Somali community as an example of the power that heavyweights like The New York Times still have.

Despite the fact that conservative outlets had been reporting on the scandal since at least 2018, and despite the fact that City Journal released a major report on the story in November, it wasn’t until the Times released its report on the story 10 days later that the scandal was “legitimized” in the eyes of the public and gained nationwide attention.

What’s more, as Adams observes, even conservatives continue to use legacy outlets to legitimize big stories. When the scandal broke over texts Virginia Attorney General-elect Jay Jones (D) sent in which he fantasized about killing a Republican lawmaker and wishing that his children would die, a GOP ad on the subject began with, “The Washington Post confirms …”

And despite the incredible rise and growing influence of conservative alternative media, few argue that they can compete with the reach, resources, and cultural influence of decades-old institutional behemoths like The New York Times (which employs 2,700 journalists) or the Associated Press (which has correspondents in 100 countries), or Reuters (which employs 2,500 global journalists). For international news in particular, it is chiefly legacy outlets that have reporters on the ground that alternative media rely on for facts.

Still, as Washington Stand Editor-in-Chief Jared Bridges told TWS, the downsizing of mainstream media is a significant development. “I think what we’re seeing now is more along the lines of the legacy media taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss. They’re trimming down quickly, but they’ll still be around, albeit in a leaner fashion. They’re necessarily a market entity, funded by ad sales and subscriptions, and we can’t ignore that they’re at the end of a significant market flex in a downward direction.”

“As for the alternative media that have emerged or are still emerging, I don’t see us as a replacement,” Bridges continued. “We simply don’t have the infrastructure that’s taken decades and sometimes centuries to build. Hopefully, there will, in the long run, be some that can grow to that level, but for now, alternative media should be just that: a corrective alternative.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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