Americans’ Distrust of News Hits an All-Time Low

But burnout won’t prevent an authoritarian government from continuing its crackdown on the press.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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The president has made a mockery of White House press briefings, barring top-tier news outlets from attending over things like refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

In a time when the president is kicking widely respected news outlets out of White House press briefings (see: The Associated Press), and calling for others to lose their broadcast licenses over coverage he doesn’t like (see: CBS); in a time when the administration is attempting to defund nonprofit public media outlets like NPR and PBS, and killing long-standing, trusted world platforms like Voice of America; and in a time when Americans are more and more getting their news from unfact-checked social media platforms run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, I, like many of you perhaps, want to bang my head on my desk and leave it there.

But as someone who works in this complex, maligned, difficult industry, I picked my head up off the desk today to read through a new, sweeping study about the news and how we consume and perceive it. I am both cheered and disheartened by the research, out today from the UK-based Reuters Institute at Oxford University, which looked at 48 media markets across six continents.

First, the good news: While there has been a clear decline of trust in the media over the last decade, the institute found that levels of trust in news globally are currently stable at 40 percent, which has been the same for the last three years.

And now the bad news, specifically for us in an ever-more dystopian America: In the Reuters survey, the level of trust in the news in the U.S. overall is at just 30 percent.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, more than half of the survey’s global respondents (58 percent) said “they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online, a similar proportion to last year.” And that concern is highest in both Africa and the United States, with 73 percent or respondents in each region agreeing with that statement. The lowest levels of concern were in Western Europe (46 percent).

The study found that particularly in the U.S., people are consuming less news across TV, print and news sites and are instead turning to social media and online aggregators for their information. More than half of Americans under 35 now say that social media and video networks are their main source of news, up 13 points and 6 points respectively compared with last year.

One problem with this is that not everyone with a TikTok or a Twitter account knows how to report, fact-check or, well, not lie, either unintentionally or intentionally. The Reuters Institute, which conducted its polling during the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, found that the number of Americans turning to social media for news was up 6 percent from the previous year.

“Taken together these trends seem to be encouraging the growth of a personality-driven alternative media sector which often sets out its stall in opposition to traditional news organizations, even if, in practice, many of the leading figures are drawn from these,” the report authors write.

While social media influencers and “personalities” (e.g. Joe Rogan) make up a large proportion of the (often partisan) sources from which Americans are getting their news more and more, around the world, news consumers said they see these people as the largest source of misinformation, with 47 percent of respondents saying so — even as Americans turn to these sources ever more frequently, joining people in most Latin American and African countries, as well as in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, where consumers get the majority of their news from social media.

In the U.S., consumers see politicians as the greatest propagators of misinformation, at 57 percent. At the same time, dangerously, the rise of news consumption from social media, the report authors say, means that many politicians “no longer feel they need to submit themselves to journalistic scrutiny.”

“Low trust and low engagement in the news are closely connected with ‘avoidance,’ an increasing challenge in a high-choice news environment, where news is often upsetting in different ways,” the authors write. Four in 10 people surveyed around the world said they “sometimes or often” avoid the news, which is about 10 points higher than it was in 2017. It’s the highest figure the institute has recorded in its 14 years of conducting their survey. And, just as life in the U.S. is roiling with misinformation and anger, 42 percent of Americans are avoiding the news.

All of this is the last thing we need in this critical moment in our country. To sum it up: apathy. Because burnout won’t prevent an authoritarian government from continuing its crackdown.

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