As Journalists Are in the Crosshairs, What Do People Know About Who They Are and What They Do?

There is almost always an adversarial relationship between the White House and the news media, but tensions have ratcheted up under the Trump administration — from requiring special rules for news organizations in the Pentagon to the recent arrests of two journalists covering a protest in a church in Minneapolis.

As the debates heat up over the First Amendment, media organizations face a special set of challenges with the public, according to the American Communities Project/Ipsos surveys.

• First, very few Americans say they actually know a working journalist. Journalists ranked at the bottom of a long list of professionals and/or groups that people know well.
• Second, most people believe the mainstream media are more interested in “making money than telling the truth.”

These two findings, which may be connected, were true across all 15 community types in the American Communities Project.

Ultimately, those attitudes matter because the fights between the administration and the press seem likely to intensify, and as they do, journalists may find it harder to garner support for their work in the court of public opinion. The data show trust in the media is at a low, something the ACP wrote about late last year.

Who Knows a Journalist?

In 2024, the American Communities Project wanted a better sense of what people’s social groups looked like across the 15 community types. Our survey asked, “Do you have immediate family members or close friends who are…” and offered a long list of possible answers, everything from “immigrants” to “scientists” to “journalists.”

The number for journalists came in far below every other group named.

“Journalist or someone who works for a news organization” garnered a remarkably low 7% in the national figures, coming in 10 percentage points below the next group, “elected officials or someone who works in the government.” Journalists also came in below “scientists” at 23% and “people who live in another country” at 33%.

It’s noteworthy that some groups scored as high as they did, such as “immigrants” at 38%, “LGBTQ+ people” at 49%, and “member of a different racial/ethnic group than your own” at 61%.

At the community-type level, the numbers don’t look any better. Journalists scored lower than every other group in every type.

There are a few notable differences at the community level. For instance, the percentage who said they knew a journalist sat at 15% in the Aging Farmlands and 10% in the Native American Lands. But that may be because those communities are sparsely populated and generally more tight-knit. The local newspaper or radio reporter might be someone people run into at the grocery store.

Across the other types, most numbers were below the national average. The number was just above average, 8%, in the Big Cities and Urban Suburbs. However, on the whole, those are very low numbers.

The Impacts

What that means for most Americans is journalism probably feels pretty foreign to them. There are few talks at the dinner table or at the coffee shop about how the job is done or why a story was handled the way it was.

For a lot of Americans in all different kinds of communities, journalists are kind of an abstraction, a person people see on TV or a byline they read somewhere or a voice they hear on the radio. It makes it harder for the public to see journalists as people just doing a job — and makes it harder for them to understand the job journalists do.

Some of this is almost certainly due to the collapse of local journalism and the closure of local newspapers around the country. The Rebuild Local News coalition estimates that the number of local journalists in the United States has dropped by more than 75% since 2002. In Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette is set to cease operations in May. And in Washington D.C., the Post just announced layoffs of more than 300 journalists, about one-third of its staff.

Being disconnected from local journalists and local news may have been a driver behind another big point in the ACP survey data, a lack of trust in the media.

Less Concerned with Truth Than Money

In 2023 and 2025, the ACP surveys offered people a list of statements with which to agree or disagree. In both years, the statement with the highest “agree” number was: “The mainstream media are more interested in making money than telling the truth.” Nationally, 75% percent agreed with that statement in 2023, and 73% agreed in 2025.

At the local level, some community types were lower, but the number who agreed never dropped below 60% anywhere. And the agree number climbed into the 80s in some places.

The numbers are relatively stable between the two years, with a few exceptions. The Military Posts saw a 10-point drop in the percentage of people saying they agreed in 2025 compared with 2023. In the Evangelical Hubs, there was a 7-point drop. It’s hard to know for certain what’s behind those drops without more reporting, but both communities were supporters of President Trump in the 2024 election.

It’s worth noting, however, that the community types of the ACP are tuned into very different media ecosystems. So the extent to which people agree on this point is somewhat surprising.

It’s possible that people in different communities have different outlets in mind when they hear the words “mainstream media.” It’s also possible that people in different kinds of communities disapprove of the “mainstream media” for different reasons — too hard on the president, too soft on the president, not enough reporting on the issues they care about.

Regardless, one thing seems clear in the data: There is a lot of distrust for the work the mainstream media are doing across the board — and not a lot of connections to the journalists doing the work.

In a tense world where quality news coverage is a necessity, that should be a deep concern for the nation’s big news organizations.