Biased, Boring Liars

A study published today by the nonprofit News Literacy Project paints a bleak picture of how young people view the press. It found that more US teens think “reporters are skilled at lying than informing the public,” and about half believe the news media frequently engages in “unethical practices such as making up quotes.” When asked what word best describes news media, 84 percent of teens surveyed “expressed a negative sentiment,” often using words like “fake,” “false,” and “lies.”

The new study, “Biased,” “Boring,” and “Bad”: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among US teens, builds on a 2024 report that found almost half of thirteen- to eighteen-year-old respondents believed that journalists do more to harm democracy than to protect it. “So we knew there was some distrust among young people, and we wanted to unpack that a little bit more and learn what was driving this teen cynicism,” said Kim Bowman, one of the new report’s coauthors and senior manager of research at the News Literacy Project.

Given last year’s results, Bowman and her colleagues were not anticipating admiration for the press. Still, they were shocked by the “overwhelming amount of negativity” they found in this new survey, which followed up with 756 of the more than 1,000 teens they surveyed in 2024. When asked what they thought journalists were doing well, roughly a third of respondents still replied using negative language—“things like ‘lying,’ ‘deceiving,’ or ‘journalists don’t do anything well,’” Bowman said. “So it really was this overwhelming amount of cynicism, and it showed us that we’ve got a couple of generations that are growing up with a very negative view of the press.”