Title: How we evaluated Americans' trust in 30 news sources | Pew Research Center
Headings: Q&A: How Pew Research Center evaluated Americans’ trust in 30 news sources
Q&A: How Pew Research Center evaluated Americans’ trust in 30 news sources
The study examines public trust in 30 U.S. media outlets for political and election news. How did you choose these outlets? Why weren’t some well-known outlets included?
How did you measure Americans’ trust and distrust in these outlets?
How did you measure changes in trust over time?
The study refers to the audiences of different news outlets as “left-leaning,” “right-leaning” or “mixed.” How did you make these determinations? And are you saying that some of these outlets themselves are “left-leaning” or “right-leaning”?
Why does the study include more outlets with left-leaning audiences than right-leaning audiences?
What do you hope readers will take away from this study?

Content: In fact, relatively few of the outlets we studied have audiences that consist mostly of liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans. Why does the study include more outlets with left-leaning audiences than right-leaning audiences? We selected these outlets based on a number of factors, including their audience size and platform type, but not based on the ideological orientation of their audiences, which we didn’t measure until later in the research process. Using this method, we ended up with 17 outlets whose audiences are left-leaning, six outlets whose audiences are right-leaning and seven outlets with mixed audiences. One factor that may be at play here is that Republicans have a more compact media ecosystem. They rely to a large degree on a small number of outlets and view many established brands as not trustworthy. Democrats, on the other hand, rely on a wider number of outlets. What do you hope readers will take away from this study? It’s often tempting to use studies like this one to “rank” media outlets against one another in terms of trust or distrust, but that wasn’t the purpose of this research. Instead