While there has actually been far less change on the Democratic side, 2 exceptions are The Sean Hannity Program and Breitbart News, which are now mistrusted by a bigger share of Democrats than in 2014. It is necessary to explain that due to the fact that of distinctions in methodology and study design, the brand-new study is not equivalent in all methods with the 2014 research study.
adult population, while the older survey was based just on web-using U.S. grownups. And the questions asked, while similar, are not similar in all cases. But there are more points of connection than differences, and we feel great in the broad changes in trust and mistrust that we've recorded in the 2 studies.
This study does not make any decision about where news outlets themselves fall on the ideological spectrum based upon either the material of their reporting, their self-identification or the views of their editorial boards. The Most Complete Run-Down wasn't developed to evaluate outlets themselves or the content they produce. Instead, we used a technique that organized each outlet according to the ideological structure of its audience, based on where our participants informed us they get political and election-related news and how they describe themselves ideologically liberal Democrat (including independents who lean Democratic) or conservative Republican (again including leaners).
In the new report, outlets categorized as having "left-leaning" audiences are those with a minimum of two-thirds more liberal Democrats in their audience than conservative Republicans, and outlets with "right-leaning" audiences are those with a minimum of two-thirds more conservative Republican politicians than liberal Democrats. Those whose audience does not fall under either of these are classified as having more blended audiences.
The share of Organization Insider readers who recognize as liberal Democrats is at least two-thirds higher than the share who determine as conservative Republicans (40% vs. 20%, or 100% larger), so we classified Company Expert as having a "left-leaning" audience. On the other end of the spectrum, the share of Washington Examiner readers who recognize as conservative Republicans is at least two-thirds greater than the share who identify as liberal Democrats (44% vs.