Looking at 115 countries over the last nearly half century, survey data documents that, first, on average trust in news has declined, second, the decline is evident from the 1980s but has accelerated as digital technologies became mainstream, and, third, most countries have seen trust fall over this period, Richard Fletcher and I show in a new publication, available in open access here.
The downward trend is not universal, with trust stable in some countries and rising in others, but it is very clear. Parts of this analysis is aligned with many professional journalists’ experience and common assumptions – trust is eroding, and digital media (probably social media in particular) are probably contributing to this among other factors including political and partisan attacks on news media.
Other parts of the analysis might be more surprising, especially if one is accustomed to thinking of the extreme outlier of the United States (where trust in news has dropped precipitously from around 70 % in the 1970s to a little over 30% in the 2020), namely that, when one looks across the world more broadly, even in the 1980s, fewer than half said they trusted the news, and while clear, the decline in many countries is far, far less dramatic than that seen in the United States. Across half a century and countries accounting for three-quarters of the world’s population we thus find that majority trust in news is thus the exception, not the rule.
The chapter is published in Mainstream News Media Trust: Antecedents, Consequences, and Remedies, published by Routledge, and edited by Nayla Fawzi, Jesper Strömbäck, and Yariv Tsfati.
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