Abstract
Media skepticism among Americans, linked to political partisanship, ideology, and hostile media perceptions, has increased in recent decades. My project expands upon present literature by addressing the impact of candidate-specific attitudes on media trust. Utilizing nationally representative survey data (American National Election Studies 2020), I ran multivariate regression analyses to test how feeling thermometers for Donald Trump and the Republican party relate to levels of media trust. Feeling thermometer scores reflect attitudes toward political candidates and parties on a scale from zero (most negative) to one hundred (most positive). Separate regressions modeled both feeling thermometer scores for Donald Trump and the difference in feeling thermometer scores between Trump and the Republican party while controlling for race, education, sex, party registration, and political ideology.
Lower levels of trust in news media were associated with more positive feelings toward Donald Trump among all individuals. Registered Republicans differed more in their attitudes toward Trump by level of media trust than non-Republicans. Media trust was also linked to a relative preference for Trump over the Republican party, indicating both intraparty division among Republicans and statistically significant differences in attitudes toward Trump and the Republican party among non-Republicans. Mixed evidence suggests that Republicans are more impacted by media trust than others. Republicans with the second-highest level of media trust exhibited the strongest preference for the Republican party over Trump compared to all other groups. My findings highlight the significance of intraparty divisions and attitudes toward candidates like Trump for future research on media trust.