The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the percentage of adults who said they had a "great deal" or "some" confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November. Earlier this year, Trump branded the entire industry as the "enemy of the American people."
The percentage of those who said they had "hardly any" confidence in the press dropped to 45 percent from 51 percent over the same period.
Confidence in Trump's administration moved in the opposite direction.
Reuters/Ipsos, which tracked confidence in major institutions every couple of months after the 2016 presidential election, found in late January that 52 percent of Americans had a "great deal" or "some" confidence in the new president's executive branch. That dropped to 51 percent in the May survey and to 48 percent in the latest poll. Trump took office in January.
In comparison, 57 percent of Americans expressed similar levels of confidence in former Democratic President Barack Obama's outgoing administration in November.
The poll also found that the shift in trust was not simply a partisan reaction to a Republican president.
From January to September, the percentage of people who had a "great deal" or "some" confidence in the executive branch dropped 6 percentage points among Republicans and 3 points among Democrats.
The percentage of those who expressed similar levels of confidence in the media rose 3 points this year among Republicans and 11 points among Democrats.
FOURTH ESTATE OR OPPOSITION PARTY?
More than other modern presidents, Trump has treated the news media as an opposition party. He has shamed individual reporters by name and responded to unflattering reports as "fake news."
Every president clashes with the news media, but Trump "has gone a step further in attacking the press and questioning their legitimacy," said Martha Kumar, a presidential historian who has worked with White House transition teams for Obama and 2008 Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain.
"What you're seeing now is a gradual recognition of the importance of the press" at a time when people are still getting used to a new president whose campaign is under federal investigation for alleged collusion with Russia, Kumar said. Trump has denied any collusion occurred.
Kumar added that confidence in the press may be rising this year because news organizations have offered wildly different perspectives on Trump, satisfying people who like him as well as those who do not.
"They're not all watching and reading the same things," she said. "They're gravitating toward organizations they trust."
Ari Fleischer, former Republican President George W. Bush's first press secretary, said any shift in the way people viewed the press and the president was likely the product of an oppositional relationship that both sides had pushed since the 2016 presidential campaign.
"Trump throws fastballs directly at the press' head. He does it almost every day," Fleischer said.
"This makes those who oppose Trump draw into the press," elevating its stature among those who would otherwise not trust the media, he said.
"But the press has played into it by the mistakes they've made, by missing the rise of Trump, by being too liberal," Fleischer added. "They've helped create this environment."
The public placed its highest levels of confidence in the military, law enforcement and academia, according to the latest poll that ended on Sept. 5. Americans lost confidence this year in the executive branch and in Congress, while their confidence rose for most other institutions, including the press and academia.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It ran three polls this year on confidence in major institutions: between Jan. 24 and Feb. 7, May 11 to May 21 and from Aug. 24 to Sept. 5.
It collected a combined 14,328 responses from those polls, and the data has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points.
We have anti-trust laws for a reason.
You can't have stuff going on inside your own nation like the Las Vegas shootings and expect everything is going to just roll along economically. You cannot have a murder for profit operations like this mass shooting in Las Vegas and not expect that there will be on-going systemic destruction. You cannot have professional liars telling lies on all the television stations across America while the people themselves stare in disbelief. These billionaire broadcasting systems have now brought about a real and true crisis for every American, just that most Americans don't yet realize what is on their heads now as a result of the corruption of the airwaves and of their own government, but they will and will they ever wonder how it all happened when it does hit.
Although official doom is reporting the mass shooting in Las Vegas is all solved, case closed, the reality is it's not happening and the instability and lack of faith is eating the pillars of the government away. This crime is exposing the complicity in the supposed solution to the criminal act, and that manifest truth is going to naturally go directly to the value of the dollar: A loss of faith in the government, in it's officials, in it's laws, these and more equal a direct loss of faith in the value of it's paper currency: Pretty simple concept.
A loss in faith in the media is a loss of faith in the government. The two are directly related. The news has to be believable because it's believed to be telling the truth, even when the government is itself suspect, but the news cannot become suspect along with a government which does nothing to correct the problem of restoring faith in the media. The two are a part of checks and balances which are supposed to serve as counters to each other. Our government is the enforcer of anti-trust monopoly laws and yet again it's they whom are wearing the saddle and being ridden by those whom they are supposed to control. So ya see, this news broadcasting liars club is taking the whole shebang down. The mass media empires of the billionaires are not only destroying our own nation with their pollution, but they have and are continuing to destroy faith in themselves with their own self made lies, and the government is doing nothing, which means they too is going down, along with the currency, which just happens to be everything we have all slaved for our whole lives.
Make sense? Ya know it's crazy but all so typical, they are doing and allowing this craziness in order to get more money and more power, while the actual outcome will be the exact opposite....which normally would be fine, it's just that I'm stuck on the Titanic along with these nut cases and so are the rest of you. It's like we are watching kids playing with matches in a barn full of dry hay. What could possibly go wrong?
The problem is we can't stop these kids for doing what they are doing any longer and so we wait for the barn to catch fire.