Trust in the media has fallen a lot since the 1970's, when about 70% of Americans trusted them. Now it's around 33%.
See the long-running Gallup poll details here.
Why has trust fallen? The Internet and alternative media has made it easier to fact-check the legacy media. Most journalists and editors lean left politically. What they report and the way they report is influenced by their biases. Not a lot of people knew that in the past. Now they do.
Timothy Groseclose published a landmark study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics quantifying media bias while he was a professor at UCLA, entitled A Measure of Media Bias.
He concluded that the "political quotient"—the degree to which Americans lean one or another on issues—is shifted leftward (he calls it "liberal") by around 20 points, which significantly influences the way they vote. Groseclose went on to publish a book on this bias, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind."
For a recent example of how a simple, quick check of the facts contradicts the claims in an article on CNN, revealing their bias, see my post "Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan."
Trust in the media by leftists (in other words, Democrats) is still fairly high, which is understandable because it's normal to trust those who have similar views as you, although their trust waxes and wanes according to who is in power, which is pretty funny.
When it's a Republican president or Congress, their trust in the media increases because the media is far more critical of Republicans than Democrats. When it's a Democrat president or Congress, their trust in the media drops because occasionally—rarely, actually—the media will be critical of Democrat leaders.
Republicans don't generally exhibit this oscillating trust because they tend to be better informed on issues, as numerous polls illustrate, and have come to understand the longstanding leftist bias in the media.
What the Public Knows about the Political Parties (Pew, April 11, 2012)
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