The Impact of Media Trust on Political Consumption: An Empirical Study Based on CSS2021

In the era of mediatized politics, news media serve not only as the core vehicle for information dissemination but also as a crucial intermediary shaping public political cognition and behavior. As the global media trust crisis intensifies and political consumption becomes increasingly explicit, the associative mechanism between media trust and political consumption has emerged as a hot topic in academic research. This study utilizes data from the 2021 China Social Survey (CSS), involving 3,546 respondents, to validate the impact of media trust on in-dividual political consumption orientation through a multiple linear logistic regression model. Results indicate that differences in media trust significantly and positively influence individual political consumption orientation. This re-search offers a new theoretical perspective for un-derstanding emerging politi-cal participation patterns in the digital age and provides practical implications for optimizing media governance.