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A new Gallup poll found that Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions—like the Supreme Court and Congress—than they were a year ago, marking new lows for all three branches of the federal government.
The poll found that only 27 percent of Americans have confidence in 14 major American institutions on average. Gallup said the number marks a new low since 1979 and a plunge of 5 percent from last year.
The poll was conducted from 1 June to 20 June, while Americans faced increased crime and high inflation. The survey pointed out that confidence in these institutions has lagged for the past 15 years. This year, the average confidence across all institutions is four points lower than 2021’s bottom.
The Supreme Court and presidency faced the most significant drop in confidence with declines of 11 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Gallup said it has never recorded a confidence reading as low as Biden’s 23 percent. The poll pointed out that all three parties are “much less confident in the presidency than they were a year ago, showing declines of at least 10 points.”
Americans have the lowest amount of confidence in Congress and television news, according to the survey. Congress experienced a 5-point drop to 7 percent.
The report pointed out that small businesses and the military are the only institutions that Americans express confidence in at 64 percent. The average confidence in these institutions was at least 40 percent from 1998 to 2004, but the number has been falling.
The poll seems to correspond to the general read from other polls. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released last week found that 85 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.
Last month, a Wall Street Journal-NORC Poll found 83 percent of respondents described the state of the economy as “poor or not so good.” About 35 percent said they “aren’t satisfied at all with their financial situation.”
Of those polled, just 27 percent said they are optimistic that they can improve their standard of living in the next year, while 46 percent said they will not improve.
“In the prior years that we’ve asked this question, there’s at least been some hope, a little bit more hope, that things might get better,” Jennifer Benz, vice president of public affairs and media research at NORC, told the paper. “That’s a key difference underlying all of this right now.”
Engagement With News Outlets Plummet in the U.S.
Americans are beginning to tune out the bullshit.
Both news consumption and engagement in the U.S. has plummeted in 2022 after reaching new highs in 2020, with prime time viewership down 19 percent in the first half of the year and engagement on social media with news outlets falling 50 percent in the first six months of the year.
Axios, citing NewsWhip, reported that engagement on social media has fallen to its “pre-pandemic” rate. The report said interest in the presidency has also fallen during the Biden administration. Google searches that include “Biden” are at the same level of searches with the key word “Trump,” according to the report. Love him or hate him, Trump got people clicking. He generated 7 times more search interest than President Obama when he took office in 2017.
TRENDPOST: The Axios report said Americans have grown tired of “what feels like a never ending cycle of bad news.” The news media’s modus operandi during the COVID-19 outbreak was to stoke fear. The Trends Journal has been documenting the sorry state of corporate media. (SEE: “CNN+ CRASHES AT LAUNCH: PUBLIC WON’T SWALLOW CARTOON NEWS CRAP” and “CNN CLOWN SHOW EXPOSES MEDIA’S POLITICAL TIES.”
In April 2020, then-President of CNN Jeff Zucker held a meeting to use the virus to increase the network’s lagging ratings. He urged editors and producers at the network not to shift focus from coronavirus new updates despite weeks of wall-to-wall coverage of the pandemic.
“You need to stay on the news,” Mr. Zucker said, according to a person who listened. “People are coming to CNN for the news right now.”
The problem with the corporate media is that they do not approach journalism as a public service, but rather an entertainment business. They are happy to sell the Johnny Depp – Amber Heard trial while the Ukraine War continues and the U.S. sends an unprecedented amount of weapons to Kyiv.
Editors only consider the amount of clicks that a story receives, accuracy and relevance is a distant second and third.
TRENDPOST: As we detail in the Trends Journal, COVID-19 lockdowns did more than just crush small businesses, they crushed the human spirit. Look out your window, what is there to be optimistic about? Inflation? Nuclear War with Russia or China? Rampant mass shootings? Choosing from the surplus of open jobs in Slavelandia?
The disaster that we are facing has nothing to do with the coronavirus, it has to do with the political science “pandemic.” For over two years—and still trending in China where the COVID War was launched on Lunar New Year 2020, The Year of the Rat—moronic, made-up, draconian lockdowns that lacked a scintilla of scientific data have destroyed the lives and livelihoods of billions across the planet.
As we have clearly illustrated and supported with facts, not one of the political, media or Bankster “officials” have blamed the COVID War’s made-up lockdown mandates for destroying the global economy. And neither of them blame the actions of governments and central banks that have created the inflation cycle by pumping trillions of dollars into economies and keeping interest rates low despite rising inflation, to artificially pump up 2020 crashing economies.