The conversation about Black men and media has been happening in barbershops, group chats, and podcast comment sections for years. Now there is a focus group to back it up.
Navigator Research, a Democratic research firm, conducted a focus group with Black men who had voted for Donald Trump in 2024 after either voting for Biden in 2020 or leaning Democratic. Phil Lewis, senior front page editor for The Huffington Post, was allowed to observe the sessions.
What he found confirms something that should already be obvious to anyone paying attention: Black men have largely stopped going to mainstream media for their news, and they are building entirely different information ecosystems in its place.
The groups included men from Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina. The conversations covered Trump’s leadership, the economy, and inflation. But what Lewis found most striking was the near-universal agreement on where these men were, and where they were not finding their information.
“They had all pretty much said, ‘We don’t really go to the mainstream media, so that’s CNN and the like, to find our news,’” Lewis told NBC4 Washington. “We’re going on podcasts. We’re finding independent creators online, on platforms like YouTube. Joe Rogan and Roland Martin, figures like these. To find their news.’”
The focus group findings are aligned with the broader collapse in public trust in traditional media. A 2025 Gallup poll found that only 28 percent of Americans said they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in newspapers, television, or radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
That is down from 31 percent in 2024 and 40 percent in 2020. Seven in ten American adults now say they have little or no confidence in traditional news reporting.
For Black men specifically, the distrust goes deeper than general media skepticism. One participant from Atlanta told the focus group that mainstream media “seemed to be more controlled” and that they did not feel they could trust what they were getting from major outlets.
That framing, media as a system with interests, not a neutral information source, is not paranoia. It is a reasonable response to decades of coverage that has consistently misrepresented, ignored, or sensationalized Black life.
The alternative information ecosystem these men described is not a single destination but a distributed network of trusted sources. Podcasts. YouTube channels. Independent creators on social media. Local news, which, notably, retained significantly more trust than national outlets.
One participant from Detroit said he relies primarily on his local Fox affiliate. The distinction between local and national is meaningful: local journalists are covering specific communities, specific institutions, specific accountability stories that affect the people watching directly. National media, from the perspective of these men, is covering something else.
Age, Lewis noted, was not the determining factor that might be expected. A 55-year-old participant told the group that he goes to YouTube for news and relies on social media. “I think social media plays such a heavy role in our lives now, even for older folks,” Lewis said. “The older folks in my family are on Facebook all the time to find their news.” The shift is generational in the sense that it spans generations.
When Lewis asked whether there was anything mainstream media could do to regain their trust, the answer was telling. The men said they wanted media to focus on issues that mattered to them. They wanted their stories told. They wanted to feel represented rather than covered.
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