Americans’ trust in the news has risen for the first time in six years, the 2023 Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows – but trust for specific news titles has dropped dramatically.
Among its other findings, the 2023 report also shows an apparent decline in US news avoidance, a sustained rise in the proportion of people paying for online news and social media on the cusp of overtaking television as the leading source for Americans’ news.
Even with the improvement, Americans’ trust in news is low in absolute terms: the country ranked 36th for trust out of the 46 markets surveyed, tying with Romania.
The report’s authors wrote: “Tentative evidence suggests that both news interest and news trust are rebounding in the US after significant drops last year.”
But they added that “if these encouraging figures reflect a slight cooling of partisan rancour in an electoral off-year, longer term declines in news trust are likely to be reasserted during the looming presidential race".
A comparison between 2023’s figures and those for 2020 shows a persistent decline in trust, as well as a growth in distrust, for every news brand about which respondents were asked.
While news engagement “remains well below” the highs of 2020, they said there had been a “hint at a recovery from the wave of ‘tuning out’ that followed the Trump presidency.” Some 73% of US respondents said they access news at least once a day - up six percentage points on 2022’s report.
Another notable finding in the report is that the proportion of Americans getting their news from social media drew equal, for the first time, to the proportion of Americans getting their news from television. Both stand at 48%.
The percent of Americans using social media for their news has remained largely flat in the RISJ reports since 2016, when it first hit 46%. However, the use of television as a primary source of news has shown a general decline, suggesting it will likely fall below social media in the next few years.
The web in general - encompassing both social media, apps and websites - has meanwhile long since supplanted television as the most popular news source for Americans, having been the top category since the Reuters Institute began asking in 2013.
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