Survey Shows Younger Americans Unwilling to Buy Into Mainstream Media Narratives

Bearing Arms and sites like us exist to counter the narrative presented by the mainstream media. We shouldn’t have to, of course, because a truly unbiased media wouldn’t have a preferred narrative. They’d just report events and facts, and do so in response to public interest, not their own.

That’s not how it works, though. We’ve seen prime examples of how the media latches onto narratives, then runs them for as long as they can, all without anyone breaking ranks.

It’s up to sites like us to push back, and that’s a lot harder than people might think, since they get piped into people’s homes, but have to seek us out.

Still, we do what we can, and we hope that it’ll be enough.

Luckily, there is some good news. It seems the upcoming generations aren’t interested in accepting the media at face value.

A few weeks ago, an alert discussed the Gallup organization’s polling that tracks historic changes in the public’s perception of mass media (newspapers, TV, and radio). Since 1972, Gallup has been asking Americans about their “trust and confidence” in mass media and how it reports the news. Its most recent polling revealed that overall trust and confidence in mass media has fallen to a new low, as only 28% of respondents felt a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. The vast majority of respondents (70%) said they had either “not very much” confidence or “none at all.”

Gallup’s survey did not include anyone under the age of 18, but a new study on those aged 13-18 years old indicates that today’s teens may be the most brutally (and deservedly) distrustful of all when it comes to the press.

The study, “Biased,”“Boring” and “Bad”(2025), was published last month by the News Literacy Project (NLP), a “nonpartisan education nonprofit that works with teachers, school districts, states and community partners” to ensure that students receive news literacy instruction by the time they graduate from high school.

The study’s title pretty much says it all. The teens surveyed about their views of journalists and news organizations were even more distrustful than what the Gallup polling revealed of their elders. Asked for a word that best describes today’s news media, 84% responded with negatives like “biased,” “fake,” “sucks,” “crazy,” “false,” “scary,” and just “bad.” Only 9% responded using a positive word. 

When asked what journalists do well, more than a third of the responses likewise focused on the negative, with answers like “telling lies,” “reporting fake news,” “overexaggerating,” “spreading misinformation” and “gaslighting.”

Most teens, the study found, “do not believe that standards-based journalism practices are the norm these days.” Only 30% of the adolescents thought journalists confirmed facts before reporting them; fully half believed that members of the press made up details, like quotes, for their stories. Only six percent responded that journalists “always or almost always” corrected errors when they occurred in their reporting, and six in 10 believe journalists frequently take photos and videos out of context.

Since this generation saw things like the Covington Kids, who were lambasted as racists who were trying to start stuff with an innocent Native American veteran, only for it to come out that they were just there minding their own business when they were approached, and they were simply trying to enjoy and vibe with the drumming.

In other words, they saw the media lie about kids their own ages, losing a number of lawsuits because of it, and then we got to 2020.

The same media that reported over and over again how the lab leak theory was just a conspiracy theory, and how it was racist to bring up the Chinese government at all, then flipped the script on masks so quickly it made your head spin, on top of everything else they did dealing with the pandemic, was bad enough. Then, it was all rounded out by that same media refusing to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, saying it was disinformation or, at the very least, not newsworthy, only for it to come out later that it was legit and newsworthy, kind of makes it hard for some of these young people to buy into the idea that the media is unbiased.

And that’s important because it means Gen Z and Alpha aren’t as likely to buy into the anti-gun narrative that’s routinely spread through the mainstream media.

As some have said, the kids are alright.

That they are.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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