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A study published today by the nonprofit News Literacy Project paints a bleak picture of how young people view the press. It found that more US teens think “reporters are skilled at lying than informing the public,” and about half believe the news media frequently engages in “unethical practices such as making up quotes.” When asked what word best describes news media, 84 percent of teens surveyed “expressed a negative sentiment,” often using words like “fake,” “false,” and “lies.” 

The new study, “Biased,” “Boring,” and “Bad”: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among US teens, builds on a 2024 report that found almost half of thirteen- to eighteen-year-old respondents believed that journalists do more to harm democracy than to protect it. “So we knew there was some distrust among young people, and we wanted to unpack that a little bit more and learn what was driving this teen cynicism,” said Kim Bowman, one of the new report’s coauthors and senior manager of research at the News Literacy Project. 

Given last year’s results, Bowman and her colleagues were not anticipating admiration for the press. Still, they were shocked by the “overwhelming amount of negativity” they found in this new survey, which followed up with 756 of the more than 1,000 teens they surveyed in 2024. When asked what they thought journalists were doing well, roughly a third of respondents still replied using negative language—“things like ‘lying,’ ‘deceiving,’ or ‘journalists don’t do anything well,’” Bowman said. “So it really was this overwhelming amount of cynicism, and it showed us that we’ve got a couple of generations that are growing up with a very negative view of the press.” 

Bowman and her colleagues wondered if pop culture might be to blame, but when prompted on whether any movies or TV shows came to mind when they thought of journalism, only about one-third of the teens said yes. “The number one mention was the Spider-Man franchise,” which, in its current iteration, features “a tabloid reporter figure working for an Infowars-esque organization,” Bowman said. “So I don’t think pop culture has a large role to play, but even within pop culture, we’ve got some work to do.” 

A potential solution is more news literacy education in K-12 schools. Teachers, Bowman said, should be showing young people how to “differentiate between news intended to inform them with facts and content that’s intended to persuade or entertain or sell,” as well as to distinguish between sources with different levels of credibility. 

News literacy education also teaches young people to value journalism, which, according to Bowman, is where the stakes rise. Roughly two-thirds of the teens in last year’s survey said they were a little or not at all concerned about the sharp decline in the number of news organizations in the US over the past twenty years. Bowman wants them to understand that the consequences extend far beyond the journalism industry. “I really want to be sure young people know what would be lost if we lost America’s Fourth Estate.” 

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