Poll: voters trust the media slightly more than the scandal-ridden Trump administration

Accusations of collusion now surround Donald Trump’s administration — the latest includes his son, Donald Trump Jr. — but at least one poll shows that the president’s approval rating is going up. Meanwhile, despite the flow of lies pouring out of his administration, only slightly more Americans find the media to be more credible than Trump himself.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday found that 46 percent of people said they approved of Trump. These numbers are actually up from past months’ polling data showing the president at a pretty stable 30 to 40 percent approval rating. FiveThirtyEight also points out that Trump’s approval ratings are higher among registered and likely voters than the adult population at large.

Morning Consult polled 1,983 registered voters from July 7 to 9 with a balanced spread of Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

And even as allegations surface that make Trump look worse in the public eye, only slightly more people say they are more confident in the information coming from news outlets than from Trump and the White House.

Twenty-six percent of people said they find CNN and the New York Times to be very credible and 24 percent said the same about Fox News and the Washington Post. However, those numbers are only a tiny bit higher than credibility ratings for the Trump administration, which continues to rail against media outlets through violent GIFs, personal attacks, and speeches decrying the press as “fake news.”

But the media is also acting as an echo chamber for Trump. According to the data, 43 percent of respondents said they don’t follow the president’s Twitter account closely at all, whereas 49 percent say they follow news reports about Trump’s tweets somewhat or very closely. Those numbers contradict Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway’s refrain that the tweets don’t matter to voters.

The poll also found that 21 percent of people found information coming out of the White House to be very credible and 22 percent said they thought Trump was equally as trustworthy.

Even PBS — which was voted the most credible — only saw 29 percent of respondents saying they trust the information coming from the outlet. PBS was followed closely by ABC (28 percent very credible), CBS, and NBC News (27 percent very credible.)

What’s more, large margins of voters — Republicans specifically — are not convinced that news outlets are to be trusted at all. A slim majority of those polled (37 percent) think CNN is not too credible or not credible at all. More than 30 percent feel the same about Fox News, MSNBC, and the New York Times.