As exhilarating as these challenges to the media might be, the potential downside they present for journalists is enormously disquieting. If Americans increasingly distrust the media, get their news essentially by osmosis through talk shows and infotainment programming, or get it directly from the source through C-SPAN or the Internet, the old style gatekeeper breed of journalist could be poised to follow the slide rule and buggy whip into oblivion. New survey data, however, go a long way toward assuaging some of the fears held by the guardians of traditional media. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans continue to rely on and report faith in many of the traditional hard news sources they have long used for news and information. It measured the frequency with which each news outlet is used by the public as a source of news and the perception of each source in terms of accuracy and objectivity.
Broadcast news has higher credibility than print.
Prime time TV newsmagazines are both popular and highly trusted, as are local television newscasts. And both are more trusted than the networks' nightly newscasts. Conspicuously missing from the top tier for perceived credibility is the nightly network news, with a net trust rating of only 43 percent. While CNN gets the highest trust ratings in the survey, local TV newscasts would have to be viewed as the heavyweight champion on the list, in that they receive high trust ratings and, according to the survey, are one of America's two most frequently used sources of news. When Bill Clinton appeared on Arsenio Hall and MTV in 1992 to promote his presidential campaign, he gave birth to a whole school of thought about the new media.