“I think some scholars would argue that there's no longer such a thing as mass media because everything is so fragmented,” said Sara Yeo, a professor in the Department of Communication at U of U.
She’s referring to mass media because a recent Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in mass media has dropped to its lowest point ever.
In late 2025, just 28% of Americans surveyed had confidence in mass media to report news "fully, accurately, and fairly,” while 34% had no confidence at all, but what exactly does Gallup mean by ‘mass media’?
“It's hard to conceptualize what they mean by ‘mass media,'" Yeo said. "People are thinking of different things, depending on your age, depending on who you are, your values, you're thinking about different kinds of media, right?”
More than 50 years ago, in 1972, when Gallup’s survey began, 68% of Americans had confidence in mass media, but according to Yeo, back then ‘mass media’ meant a mostly ‘shared media experience’ which consisted of a few TV channels, a few radio stations, and a local, or maybe national, newspaper.
That means that everyone’s definition of the term ‘mass media’ was pretty much the same, but that’s no longer the case. Someone asked about ‘mass media’ today could be thinking of very different things.
“And so, you might be thinking about national media, you could be thinking about local media, you might be thinking about social media, especially if you're younger," Yeo said.
Now, audiences are spread across platforms. News is filtered through algorithms that encourage interactivity, and increasingly, people choose sources that align with their views.
The result is what researchers often describe as fragmentation, a media environment where people are no longer seeing the same stories, or the same framing of those stories.
And that makes trust harder to measure, and harder to maintain.
