First, let’s take a look at Gallup since they tell the recent history of the mainstream media’s trust with the public. The trends have been in decline for more than a decade, but the tail end shows an acceleration. Not coincidentally, 2015 is when Donald Trump entered the political arena, and as of September 2016, we’ve seen an 8% further descent in the media’s trust.

Back in April 2016, Media Insight Project released their polling on the media’s trust. The results are appalling. They found that only 6% of Americans expressed “a lot of confidence” in the press! That’s less than Congress’s approval rating hovering in the mid-teens.

There are a lot of theories as to the drastic decline. The media has been exposed. As Stefan Molyneux puts it [paraphrasing] “for the first time ever, the people are able to break down stories in real time.” Citizen journalism is on the rise. Every American has access to information and dozens of sources to find many angles and facets to a story. Pictures uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram remove the once flowery, subjective reporting of events to reveal indisputable accuracy. Additionally, social media enables us to break through the once perceived isolation of our own ideas. We can now easily see friends and family who share similar or differing viewpoints and rapidly link sources that strengthen or combat those ideas, policies, and theories. The internet is a free market of ideas, and like all free markets, competition delivers efficiency and finer tuned precision on those ideas.

The mainstream media has been the gatekeepers to knowledge of events and stories for centuries. Following the money, we know where their allegiance resides. But Donald Trump has cultivated an atmosphere that has turbo charged their bias. In the greatest effort to prevent his presidency, they sunk even lower. And the people have noticed.

The Media Research Center (MRC) released a post-election poll depicting the evisceration of trust that formerly laid in center of the media’s utility. They found that “7 in 10 (69%) voters do not believe the news media are honest and truthful.”

These three polls above describe a much deserved and rapid decline in the mainstream media’s trust with America today. Feel energized and emboldened, the truth’s numbers are now in a rapid incline.