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: With today’s vast and fractured media landscape, our goal was not to do anything like a census. Instead, we wanted to choose a variety of news outlets with substantial audiences across different platform types. To that end, we included major broadcast and cable TV networks, public broadcasters, political radio shows, high-circulation national newspapers, high-traffic digital news outlets and international news sources with a substantial readership in the United States, among other kinds of outlets. Most of the outlets we studied were part of a similar study we published in 2014, which allowed us to track whether partisans’ trust in them changed over time. One group not included here are wire services like The Associated Press and Reuters. While those organizations certainly produce a great deal of original reporting, our study is not an assessment of news brands, but an analysis of outlets Americans turn to for news and the trust levels of those outlets. Most Americans get news from the wires through another news outlet that carries their syndicated content. We also took into consideration things like web traffic, topic focus and responses to open-ended survey questions about people’s main sources for political news. Social media sites as a source for political news were asked about separately and will be a part of a future analysis. How did you measure Americans’ trust and distrust in these outlets?