Thanks to gjohnsit for posting the graphs from this Gallup report on confidence in the news media:
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Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' confidence in two facets of the news media -- newspapers and television news -- has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year.

Gallup has tracked Americans' confidence in newspapers since 1973 and television news since 1993 as part of its annual polling about major U.S. institutions. The latest readings are from a June 1-20 poll that saw declines in confidence ratings for 11 of the 16 institutions measured and no improvements for any.

Television news and newspapers rank nearly at the bottom of that list of institutions, with only Congress garnering less confidence from the public than TV news. While these two news institutions have never earned high confidence ratings, they have fallen in the rankings in recent years.

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Bottom Line

Multiple Gallup measures of Americans' views of the news media show a growing distrust. Last fall, Gallup found near-record-low trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, and few Americans rated newspaper and television reporters as highly ethical in Gallup's annual honesty and ethics of professions poll in December. Although trust in the media in the U.S. has been scarce for many years, confidence ratings for newspapers and TV news have never been as low as they are now. Taken together, these data suggest that the media has a long way to go to win back the public's confidence.

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As of the days of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and George Wallace, the "conservatives" condemned the "liberal" media for painting a false picture of the world in service of its own ideological agenda. A lifetime later, the media has lived up to that description -- at least in the eyes of more than 80% of the country, according to Gallup.

Ah, but this does not say anything about online "news." I have not been able to find in my short run through google any easy to grasp accounts of what internet users think about online credibility. And it is fair to say that the online market for news is FAR more diversified ideologically than legacy media. For my current argument, I therefore turn from consumer confidence to a simple question about the size of the online audience.
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Pew: Trends and Facts on Online News

Audience

The news outlets included in this analysis are those whose primary domain – the outlet’s flagship website – averaged at least 10 million unique visitors per month from October to December of each year analyzed, according to Comscore, a cross-platform audience measurement company. This includes both digital-native news publishers, such as Axios or HuffPost, and so-called “legacy” news organizations (those that originated in print or broadcast) like The New York Times or Fox News that met those traffic levels. There were 97 such outlets in 2020 (for a full list of outlets and collection methods, see the methodology).

The average fourth quarter monthly unique visitors for the primary domains of these outlets in 2020 was 32.1 million, an 11% increase over the 29 million visitors those sites received in 2019, according to Comscore data. The average minutes per visit was 1.95, down from 2.13 minutes in 2019.

According to Pew, the total audience for this category of digital news is less than ten percent of the population of the USA, maybe 25 percent of the voting cohort.

Less than two minutes per visit on average, and going down.

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The point I keep trying to make is that Propaganda is NOT working on anybody but the people who pay attention to it, and not even all that many of them. Those of us who are motivated to comment on public affairs on a regular basis are a minuscule portion of humanity. Furthermore, we spend far more than two minutes virtually every time we log on. We are not the norm.

Only 11% and 16% of the public has confidence in the truth of the "news" on TV and in newspapers. A similar percentage of the public pays attention to online sources. Although it is extremely difficult to assess what people are gleaning from their two minutes of online news consumption, I feel comfortable asserting that anybody who only checks out the "news" for five or ten minutes is not reaching anything resembling a reasoned opinion on anything.

We must stop assuming that The People are sheep who believe whatever Rachel Maddow says. They do not know much, but that is a far cry from believing that "weakening Russia" is a good idea.

Only idiots believe that. Trolls pretend to.

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Although polling is problematical, the weakness of the method used by Gallup is mitigated by the long term nature of the project. The trend lines are consistent and are bending downward across the board. I am eager to see any audience research or polling data that shows how many people are really believing the specific "facts" asserted by the Narrative Makers.