How misleading coverage inflates support for Trump's return-to-office mandate

The Hill

13-05-2025

An article from the non-profit Center Square news wire recently proclaimed with certainty that 'a majority of Americans' applaud President Trump's order forcing every federal employee back to the office.
Scratch the surface, though, and the arithmetic crumbles.
The poll itself, conducted by the news wire reveals that only 43 percent of respondents endorse returning all federal workers to their desks, a figure printed in the third paragraph of the story. That's not a majority.
Another 27 percent support an order that affects 'essential' employees. Yet those men and women were already in the office under former President Joe Biden's return-to-office requirement. By fusing those two camps together and labeling the sum a 'majority,' the article inflates support for Trump's sweeping mandate. This buries the inconvenient fact that no, 57 percent do not back sending every telework-eligible civil servant back into downtown D.C.
The distortion deepens when you examine the opposition numbers. Sixteen percent flatly reject any in-office mandate, and 14 percent remain unsure, according to the same survey. Even with this doubt on the record, the piece frames skepticism as fringe.
The structure of the questionnaire supplies the trick; it blends Biden's status-quo option with Trump's radical shift and reports the blend as enthusiasm for universal in-office work in the federal government.
That sleight of hand does not survive a second look, yet many readers never get that second look because the packaging feels authoritative. The framing matters because headlines travel farther than footnotes. They surface in social feeds, news apps, and inbox summaries stripped of context.
Moreover, the headline causes what psychologists call the effect 'anchoring bias.' Once a first number lodges in the mind, later corrections struggle to dislodge it. When the first figure is misleading, the damage lasts.
The Center Square, funded through opaque conservative donor networks, produces content with a free-market, anti-labor tilt. It thrives on a syndication model designed for today's hollowed-out local newsrooms. Cash-strapped editors searching for content can drop its statehouse copy straight onto the page at no cost. Ohio's Highland County Press and many similar outlets did exactly that within hours of the poll's release, headline intact and context stripped.
Readers trust these papers because they anchor community life. Gallup and the Knight Foundation find that Americans exhibit more than twice the emotional trust in local outlets as in national media. When an inaccurately framed wire story like this one flows through that trusted channel, skepticism plunges.
You, the reader, wield a sharper tool than any syndicated headline: deliberate attention. Start by reading the original survey questions rather than just the press-release summaries. Ask whether response categories overlap or conflate separate policies. Calculate percentages yourself; subtraction exposes the missing half of every inflated majority. Then trace the publication's funding — in this case donor-advised funds committed to an agenda of shrinking government.
Broader vigilance also relies on competing data from quality sources. For example, a poll by AP-NORC found support for a blanket federal return-to-office policy hovering near 40 percent in January 2025. This is a lot closer to what the poll above actually showed. When one outlet proclaims an overwhelming consensus, yet multiple independent surveys with higher credibility depict a divided public should not be accepted uncritically.
Finally, readers should hold local editors to their own civic mission. Write a short letter flagging the numerical contortions of this coverage. Demand a follow-up that presents the full distribution of opinions and clarifies that 'essential' employees were already in the office before Trump's order.
Request that the newspaper's editors and reporters take the Pro-Truth Pledge (and take it yourself). Most hometown journalists care about accuracy and community trust. They usually lack the bandwidth, not the will, to vet every free wire story. When readers supply evidence, corrections often follow.
Each alert reader who challenges deceptive framing makes it harder for fringe statistics to masquerade as consensus. Each editor who pauses before copying wire text slows the pipeline that carries partisan narratives into living rooms. Journalism regains credibility not through grandiose pledges but through thousands of such micro-checks, day after day.
A democracy that values open debate cannot rely on arithmetic trickery. The Center Square poll repackaged minority support as a sweeping mandate, then rode the credibility of local papers to national notice. By dissecting the numbers, following the funding, and insisting on rigorous standards from every outlet, you protect the public square from manipulation. The task demands patience and persistence, yet the reward is a discourse grounded in fact, not spin.
Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and authored the best-seller 'Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.'