2024 saw Americans' trust in the legacy media hit an all-time low,

with only 31% of people saying they have a great deal or even a fair amount of trust in the biggest outlets that bring us our news.

Among independent voters, that number is only 27%.

In fact, according to Gallup, today, the media is the least trusted civic and political institution,

behind even Congress, the group that was previously at the bottom of the barrel.

In this episode of Morning Wire, Daily Wire, Culture Reporter Megan Basham looks at the bungled stories,

bad reporting, and in some cases outright deceptions that contributed to

media distrust in 2024. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley. And this is a

special edition of Morning Wire. Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham joins us now to look back at the year's biggest media fails that are contributing to the public's record low trust.

But, Megan, before we get into that, can you give us a quick overview on where the industry stands now?

Along with some of the controversies and corrections, there was also a lot of contraction this year

in the news industry, and that's notable because it was an election year. Yeah, very true. And I do

have to say that the media landscape right now looks, well, bad. It looks really bad. If you'll

remember Georgia, right before the start of the year, we saw substantial layoffs at the Washington Post,

the New York Times, NPR. And as you said, that's not what you expect to see heading into a major

campaign year when media revenues typically tend to increase. Then if we go back to the beginning of

the year, in January, the Los Angeles Times cut more than 20% of its newsroom. Time Magazine cut 15%. And that

kind of bad news just continued throughout 2024. By the summer, CNN had laid off 100 people,

and they're now reportedly planning to lay off hundreds more. Comcast may sell MSNBC, and neither of those developments should be

surprising when you look at some of the cable news ratings. To put it bluntly, they're a dumpster fire.

According to Nielsen data, MSNBC is still down by more than half of what it was averaging up to

election night, and CNN is down by slightly less than half, though it didn't have as far to fall because it was already at the bottom of the pack.

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