83% Of Americans Trust Journalists For Coronavirus Info. 50% Trust Social Media

President Trump’s promised Coronavirus miracle may actually have arrived, although in slightly different form than predicted. COVID-19 seems to have boosted people’s faith in media, according to a recent survey of 1,000 people.

83% of Americans said they trusted online news sites for Coronavirus information.

That’s considerably up from 2017 numbers, when only 41% said they trusted the media, or 2018, when a majority of those surveyed said they had lost faith in the media — and expected that change to be permanent.

Verizon conducted the study to test if Coronavirus content is brand-safe: in other words, if brands who advertise next to news stories about the pandemic suffer from close proximity of the news. According to the Verizon Media study, it is. But other areas the survey focused on include what’s reputable. And the survey has good news for those who have encountered a significant number of conspiracy theories on social media lately.

The top-two qualities people look for when consuming COVID-19 news are “fact-based” (63%) and “trustworthy” (61%).

Verizon

More people use news sites to keep up with Coronavirus or COVID-19 news than use social media, and 83% trust those news sites, while 50% trust what they see on social media.

Trusting social media is not necessarily a bad thing, as Facebook and Twitter posts can reference fact-based studies, surveys, or reports. Many, however, tend to cite no sources at all, or else a dodgy YouTube video featuring a plausible-sounding but ultimately unverified “expert” who jumps to unwarranted conclusions effortlessly and frequently.

MORE FROM FORBES29% Of Americans Think Coronavirus Was Made In A Lab, 70% Think The Media Is Covering It Well

Renewed trust is a good thing.

(Part of that trust comes, of course, from journalists being upfront with their sources and potential biases. Verizon is of course a media company itself that owns Yahoo, TechCrunch, and HuffPost, and therefore has a vested interest in media being trustworthy. That’s unlikely to have impacted the actual poll results, but the poll itself would be unlike to become public if it didn’t show positive results.)

President Trump, of course, said that Coronavirus would disappear “like a miracle.”

Some degree of restored faith in the media would be a bit of a miracle, given the tendency today to reject anything that does not align with our particular worldview.

But it is not perhaps the miracle we all need most right now.

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