Okay, so we knew that liberals and progressives tend to get news from more and different sources than conservatives. Barring evidence to the contrary, liberals tend to trust what is presented by those more and varied news sources, according to a Pew Research survey just completed.
Even Breitbart News reports on the survey and deals with it in a fairly unbiased manner. (Well, someone had to go over to Breitbart to read their view on the survey and take a hit for the team, so I did it.)
More on this survey below: some of the information presented was quite surprising.
Pew Research did a survey to ascertain which media sources various politically-aligned groups of people trust more than 50% of the time (and which sources they distrusted). (Link has lots of cool graphs and charts breaking down the data in various ways for those that like that sort of thing.)
Alas, Daily Kos, while listed as one of the media outlets, did not break the 50% mark, even amongst those that identified as consistently liberal. On the other hand, Breitbart News did not break that mark amongst those who identified as consistently conservative either, so I guess that counted as a push.
This is more evidence my wife is a crypto-liberal (a person who identifies as a conservative but holds liberal values). Pew notes above that conservatives strongly rely on FOX News Channel for their source of information. On the left, no single outlet dominates the others. Interestingly, on the left 5% of the respondents cited both MSNBC and FOX News Channel as their primary sources of news. (Stand by for FOX to crow its "liberal chops". . . .) [this line edited to correct punctuation]
The groups of people were categorised as consistently liberal, mostly liberal, mixed, mostly conservative, and consistently conservative. There are charts analysing the data in several different ways.
Each person was asked if he had heard of each of a list of thirty-six outlets. The more liberal, the more outlets the average person had heard of. (Consistently liberal people averaged twenty-six of the outlets, consistently conservative averaged only six of the thirty-six). If a person indicated he had heard of the outlet and had viewed it recently, he was asked if he trusted it. If no, he was then asked if he distrusted it.
Of the thirty-six media sources listed, I recognise all thirty-six (and have viewed nearly all of them). However, Pew Research never polls me for their surveys so my input was unable to skew its data.
As it turns out, the more liberal a person is, the more likely he views a wider variety of sources as trustworthy as well.
While the report linked above goes into details of the methodology of the survey, the results were as follows:
Consistently Liberal:
National Public Radio (NPR) 72%
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 71%
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 69%
New York Times 62%
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) 56%
Cable News Network (CNN) 56%
American Broadcasting Company (ABC) 52%
MSNBC (formerly Microsoft and National Broadcasting Company Network) 52%
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) 51%
Mostly Liberal:
CNN 66%
NBC 66%
ABC 59%
CBS 55%
PBS 50%
Mixed:
CNN 61%
ABC 56%
NBC 54%
CBS 50%
Mostly Conservative
FOX News Channel 72%
Consistently Conservative
FOX News Channel 88%
Sean Hannity Radio Show 62%
Rush Limbaugh Radio Show 58%
Glenn Beck Radio Show 51%
The entire report is fascinating. It is worth reading.
"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing.