ethics honesty integrity respect
Politicians, lawyers, telemarketers, and journalists sit at the low end of a new survey asking which profession has the highest ethics and honesty.

Nurses are on top of the latest Gallup survey, with 84 percent viewing their profession as one with "very high" ethics.

Last sit members of Congress. Just 8 percent view them as highly ethical and 58 percent view as having "very low" ethics, the biggest percentage in the annual poll taken since 1976.

Below average are journalists - even lower than scandal-plagued Catholic priests. Some 33 percent of those polled said reporters are honest and have high ethics and 34 percent said the industry's ethics and honesty are low.

GAllup pole honesty ethics
Still, at just 33 percent, the public's view of the ethics of journalists is at a 41-year high.

Gallup said that's a good thing and attributes that to a backlash by Democrats and independents to President Trump's criticism of his coverage.

"This year, positive assessments of journalists' ethical standards have rebounded, owed largely to shifting opinions of Democrats and independents, who may be reacting to President Donald Trump's repeated characterizations of the news media as 'the enemy of the people,'" said Gallup.


Comment: That's the power of propaganda for you.


GAllup pole honesty ethics
The polling service explained the political division over journalism this way:
"Democrats' very high/high rating of journalists' honesty has jumped 21 points since 2016 to 54 percent this year. For their part, political independents' views have shifted from a 42 percent low and a 20 percent high ethics rating to roughly one-third each now saying journalists have high, average and low ethics. At the same time, Republicans' views are essentially unchanged, with 61 percent now giving journalists low ethics ratings."
GAllup pole honesty ethics
Even with that polling bounce, reporters are seen as less ethical than clergy despite the ever-expanding sex scandal sweeping through the Catholic Church. Gallup put their ethics rating at 37 percent.