The Week in Charts

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

The Week in Charts

Welcome to The Week in Charts, where we break down Gallup's latest insights on our constantly evolving world. Here are the five insights you shouldn't miss this week:

1. Do You Trust What You Read or Watch?

Line Chart: 16% of Americans say they have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers in 2022, compared to 11% in television news.

Americans have never been more down on the media. Confidence in many forms of news media is historically low.

While some may point out that this trend is true for nearly all institutions, or identify Donald Trump's anti-establishment rhetoric as the cause, the truth is that the decline has been long coming and, with few exceptions, bipartisan — and spans different forms of journalism, including newspapers and TV news.
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2. Incumbents in Congress Face Strong Wind

Line Chart: 53% of U.S. registered voters think their U.S. representative in their congressional district should be reelected in 2022.

As the midterms near (yes, only a few months out now), we asked Americans whether those already elected deserve to keep their jobs. This year, we captured a big appetite for change among the American public.

With Congress' approval ratings through the floor, it's fitting that the public thinks most shouldn't keep their seats come November. While many want their own representatives to keep their jobs, there is a ferocious appetite for changes to take place in Washington.
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3. Sri Lanka Foreshadowing?

Bar Chart: The top 10 countries where respondents say they have had not had enough money to buy the food their family needed over the past 12 months.

The world watched as protesters stormed the president's and prime minister's residences this month. But are the troubles triggered by inflation and cost of living pains in Sri Lanka a sign of potential social turbulence in other countries where people can't meet life's basic needs?

We've identified the nations that most struggled to afford food in 2021, but this list could now be as long as this entire email when considering global inflation and grain import shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine.

4. Americans' Confidence in Public Schools

Line Chart: 28% of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in public schools in 2022.

Despite a short-lived, pandemic-induced surge in Americans' confidence in public schools, skepticism again prevails, with just over a quarter of folks expressing confidence.

Republicans continue to drag this metric down, with only 14% expressing confidence in public schools and half saying they have little to no confidence. Despite the similarity between Democrats and Republicans on confidence in schools in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, the past 20 years have seen an increasing partisan gap between the groups.
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5. Africa Gets More Connected in the Pandemic

Bar Chart: The top five countries with substantial increases in internet access between 2019 and 2021 in sub-Saharan Africa, with change in percentage points.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, Gallup finds that more people have internet access than ever before. This includes for the region's largest economies, South Africa and Nigeria.

With bandwidth and cost still significant challenges across many of the region's largest populations, overall, more are connecting to the world digitally.
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And that's The Week in Charts!

Mohamed Younis
Editor-in-Chief
Gallup

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