Americans distrust al Jazeera less than NBC?

Americans distrust al Jazeera less than NBC!

Only 16% distrust al Jazeera, while 19% distrust NBC News.

This is me fuckin' with you. The numbers are real, but it's a case of how you can make stats say whatever you want them to. Here's how:

50% of Americans "trust" NBC, 19% distrust.

9% of Americans "trust" al Jazeera, 16% distrust.

The reason for the result I cited in the first sentence is that very few people know about al Jazeera as a news source. Those who do know, tend to distrust it. Look at it this way: of the people with an opinion either way, 64% (16 of 25) distrust al Jazeera, only 28% (19 of 69) distrust NBC.

An objective result: The most trusted sources of news are British. The Economist, with a trust/not ratio of 6:1 is first, followed by the BBC, with a trust/not ratio of more than 5:1. No other source has a ratio exceeding 4:1.

Among the American media, the most trusted liberal-leaning source is NPR at 3.22:1. The most trusted conservative source is The Wall Street Journal at 3.1:1

The least trusted source of all is BuzzFeed, with a ratio of 1:4, followed by Rush Limbaugh at 1:3.25. That's a fairly balanced appraisal because Buzzfeed and Rush tend to lean in opposite directions.

Perhaps the saddest thing about this article is that it comes from the Washington Post, and they were forced to report that they were not one of the most trusted sources. With a ratio below 2:1, they scored worse, for example, than USA Today or Google News. To their credit, they didn't try to hide that fact in the table, although their lede was essentially "Limbaugh sucks," as you might expect, rather than "Woodward and Bernstein would be ashamed of us, " or "thank God Ben Bradlee can't see this."