Trust in media is rising — yes, you read that right
Hey, hope you’re having a great Saturday. I’m about to take my family to the pumpkin patch. 🎃 Here are some superb weekend reads, along with a few key media stories to get caught up on…
Polls tracking trust in media typically only move in one direction: Down. But Gallup’s latest poll actually shows year-over-year gains in trust.
In response to Gallup’s annual question about how much trust and confidence Americans have in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 33% said a “great deal” or a “fair amount,” up from 28% last year.
While overall levels of confidence are still agonizingly low, the year-over-year changes are worth analyzing.
This year’s uptick came from Republican respondents. “Republicans’ confidence in the media rose to 22% this year, up from a record-low 8% in 2025,” Gallup stated.
“Republicans’ trust in the media hasn’t passed 20% since 2018, and 22% is the highest the figure has ticked over the past 10 years,” The Hill’s Mira Bhakta wrote.
This next part is equally interesting: “Democrats’ evaluation moved in the opposite direction, with their trust hitting a historic low of 50%,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, 31% of independents trust the media, a slight increase from 28% in 2025.”
“In the end it all happened quite quickly,” Deadline’s Max Goldbart observed. “Several weeks back it appeared that David Ellison might feel the full force of regulators,” but “fast-forward to Wednesday and the $110B Paramount–WBD mega-merger was officially waved through and the new company will officially launch on Tuesday.”
So get used to saying Skydance instead of Paramount.
“Senior leaders at Paramount are expected to spend the weekend completing leadership and integration strategies for the combined company in advance of Tuesday’s expected close,” the WSJ’s Joe Flint wrote last night.
Last night on “Real Time,” Bill Maher made reference to the news: “Paramount now owns Warner Discovery, which owns HBO, which owns my ass. So I am owned by — I don’t know. You know what? Whoever does, whoever owns me now, don’t believe what Trump is tweeting about me.”
Larry Ellison “thinks of himself as an octopus and has wrapped his arms around Silicon Valley, Hollywood, DC, Israel and Hawaii,” Tom Dotan writes.
Dotan worked on this new Vanity Fair profile of Larry for a year, “talking to the people closest to him to understand what the 82-year-old increasingly reclusive billionaire wants.”
Among the many takeaways: Larry’s fatherly pride. “The man who was given up by his mother and played only a minor role in David’s and Megan’s upbringing is trying to make good,” Dotan writes. Read the rest here…
>> Andrea González-Ramírez recounts “how student journalists broke the ‘Cornell Seven’ case.” (The Cut)
>> Zoe Sottile details how “To Catch a Predator,” the show dramatized in the new movie “Primetime,” “spawned a generation of online pedophile hunters.” (CNN)
>> Lauren Harper highlights this ridiculousness: “Oregon police are charging a local news outlet $2.5 million for records” about one officer accused of misconduct. (The Intercept)
Two GOP heavyweights are releasing new books on Tuesday and starting their book tours on CBS this weekend.
This afternoon CBS announced that Ross Douthat has an exclusive interview on Sunday’s “60 Minutes” with retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, whose book “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents” is definitely antagonizing President Trump.
Earlier in the day, CBS chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford will be on “Face the Nation” previewing her sit-down with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito about his book “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country.” That interview will roll out on Monday.
“How is that possible?” That’s what Ainsley Earhardt asked on Friday after a Fox News poll showed James Talarico leading Ken Paxton in Texas. Numerous other polls have shown Talarico in the lead, too. But to Earhardt it’s unbelievable.
There’s a lot of that going around right now. “Election deniers think the GOP’s terrible midterm polling is a ‘psyop,’” WIRED’s David Gilbert wrote in his latest piece.
>> Nate Silver is out with a new column this afternoon titled “What if the polls are wrong again?” He notes that “systematic polling errors are common. Polls might be biased against Republicans again. Or against Democrats. Predicting which way they’ll miss is the hard part.”
We featured TIME’s Trump cover earlier this week, but this part is worth revisiting:
“Since returning to office, Trump has marveled at AI’s capabilities,” Eric Cortellessa wrote. “He is increasingly in thrall to the tech executives courting him. In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present.”
Trump “asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.”
The president needs a refresher on the difference between “views” and “viewers.” Twice this week, he defended his lackluster midterm convention by claiming it had “over 100 million views, I think it was 107,” while “the NFL had 25 million views. So we had four times what the NFL did.”
No, not at all. The NFL kickoff game averaged 25 million viewers, not views, over a period of several hours. Views is a totally different metric, favored by streaming sites that might count just a fleeting glimpse as a view.
If anyone honestly converted the NFL kickoff-game viewership into discrete views, the total would be in the billions. But I don’t expect anyone in Trump’s inner circle to explain that to him.
“Two people detained outside a Chicago-area immigration detention center last year are suing right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson for defamation, saying he falsely portrayed them as violent extremists who assaulted federal officers,” MS NOW’s Brandy Zadrozny reported yesterday. The pair “said they were detained while protesting peacefully outside the Broadview detention center, but that Johnson knowingly framed them as criminals and ‘left-wing terrorists’ in videos he posted to millions of viewers,” per Zadrozny.
The suit appears to be the first defamation case “related to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown filed against a member of the administration’s unofficial team of MAGA influencers,” Zadrozny wrote. Johnson did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
“More than a year after the Trump administration attempted to dismantle Voice of America, it is paying an estimated $1.6 million a week to keep 420 of its staffers on administrative leave,” the WaPo’s Scott Nover reported, citing numbers that were published in a State Department inspector general report earlier this week.
“It has never made any sense for USAGM to pay people and not get the benefit of their talents and commitment to telling America’s story around the world,” Michael Abramowitz told Nover.
Abramowitz said he’s “encouraged” that Sarah B. Rogers, who is waiting to be confirmed as USAGM boss by the Senate, wants to bring back VOA staffers…
The Kennedy Center’s annual honors gala will relocate to the Capital One Arena on Dec. 7, marking the first time the tribute ceremony “will be held somewhere other than the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty wrote. This year’s honorees have yet to be selected…
>> Related: Janay Kingsberry made the case that “Trump got what he wanted from the Kennedy Center Honors” because “the show won’t be able to feature artists who reject him.” (The Atlantic)
That’s the question Chaotic Era’s Kyle Tharp asked, reporting new data showing that “for some of the biggest partisan voices on the platform, subscriber growth has completely stalled.” Tracking more than 400 political YouTube channels, Tharp found they collectively added “roughly 67% fewer net new subscribers” in Q3 compared to a year ago.
Maybe it’s news/politics fatigue? “Viewers on both sides of the aisle may only have so much appetite for boomer-coded, ragebait breaking news about Trump, and many of these creators are hitting that ceiling sooner than anyone expected,” Tharp wrote.
Amid reports that Jimmy Kimmel and Disney are holding talks about a new contract, Dana Walden said at the Bloomberg Screentime conference that “it’s a very challenging day part, late night.”
“Reading between the lines” of Walden’s comments, “ABC wants massive budget cuts on Kimmel and are going to cancel if he refuses,” WSJ film critic Kyle Smith wrote on X.
As we’ve been documenting here, Disney is in the midst of making major cuts. On Thursday, the Journal reported that yet more layoffs are planned in the company’s TV operation.
“Still, Walden made clear that the talks are about more than a spreadsheet,” LateNighter’s Jed Rosenzweig wrote here…
>> Tony Romo “will not be returning to CBS Sports after his arrest for drunk driving earlier this summer.” (CNN)
>> NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly is “stepping down as host of ‘All Things Considered’ and ‘Sources & Methods.’” (X)
>> Beehiiv is raising its prices. (The Verge)
>> Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla “are demanding social media platforms have plans in place to combat false and misleading content” ahead of the midterms, Gabby Miller wrote. (POLITICO)
>> “When prompted, AI chatbots will edit images to remove the hijabs from Muslim women, a violation of one of the world’s most common and visible expressions of faith,” Johana Bhuiyan wrote. (The Guardian)
>> Slovenia’s .si domain name “is seeing unprecedented demand after President Trump signed an executive order mandating all government agencies to refer to ‘AI’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ as ‘SI’ and ‘super intelligence,’” Dominic-Madori Davis reported. (TechCrunch)
Google’s aggressive push to make AI ubiquitous in schools “has helped push many students to become academically and emotionally dependent on AI, according to interviews with more than 60 teachers, school officials, parents, children and clinicians,” Shalini Ramachandran, Georgia Wells and Molly Reinmann report in a must-read for the WSJ. Here’s a gift link to the article.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.i