The unseen truth about global trust in news

Trust is the currency which makes democracies and societies function, the social glue that binds people and structures together. Undermining trust in the governance system, in institutions, in media and between people is an early step in any authoritarian’s plan for destroying democracy.

- By LUBA KASSOVA and RICHARD ADDY

Given that news media’s narrative about itself is important in shaping public opinion, it is noteworthy that for over a decade global news media has largely argued that trust in news is declining. AKAS’ analysis of over 500,000 online news articles published since January 2020, using the GDELT global news database, revealed that terms emphasizing declining trust in news featured six times more frequently than those suggesting stability or increased trust.

To test the collective wisdom further for World News Day aimed at amplifying the value of fact-based journalism, we asked Chat-GPT to summarize the global trend for trust in news in the last five years. Its answer confirmed a negative lens, stating that global trust in news had generally declined due to sustained erosion driven by “misinformation, political polarisation and news avoidance.”

In short, this narrative of decline is among the least contested and most repeated beliefs in journalism. But is it true? To find out, we interrogated seven leading surveys covering news trends.

The analysis discovered that blanket statements about decline in global trust in news are inherently inaccurate and overly negative. Whilst in the US, trust in news has collapsed since the 1970s, this is not reflected much in the rest of the world, especially in the last five years when trust in news has often risen. What this reflects instead is a tendency for media to project trends observed in the US as global phenomena.