A new wide-ranging study finds that trust in news has fallen further in countries where television news use has declined, as well as in countries where more people are turning to social media for news.
Richard Fletcher, director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), and co-authors analyzed data from 46 countries over a decade and found that “as media environments became less characterized by television news use, and increasingly characterized by social media news use, this was associated with a decline in trust.”
But — alert, important caveat, according to Sarah Scire at Neiman Lab — “it is important to acknowledge that the analysis we present here cannot identify the direction of causation.”
In other words, “the link between media use and trust is clear, but it is difficult to use the data to identify which changes first,” Fletcher explained to me in an email. “Does falling trust cause people to change their media use, or do changing media habits cause lower trust?”
The study found that — on average, across all countries studied — certain groups are more likely to trust news, including women, older people, and people without university degrees. That relationship doesn’t always hold when the results are broken down by country and year, however, suggesting “there is no simple, universal reason for why these groups have higher trust overall,” Fletcher noted.
In the United States, Fox News is highly trusted by Republicans and research shows many Republicans often don’t trust other mainstream news outlets. Fletcher says that America is “something of an outlier” in this regard.
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