Trust in News Falls as Social Media Grows: Longitudinal Data from 46 Countries

• In Event: Trust in News: Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Across the world, platforms that offer personalized content have become increasingly important parts of how people access news, as the importance of broadcast television, radio, and printed newspapers has stagnated or declined (Newman et al., 2022).

At the same time, trust in news has fallen in some countries (Hanitzsch et al., 2017). This matters because most newsworthy events occur outside of the realm of one’s personal experiences, meaning that people’s willingness to believe the news media’s descriptions of them must partly depend on whether they are trusted. At least in theory, some degree of trust is an essential precondition for people to be informed by the news media.

But are recent changes to trust and media use linked? Does the move from direct discovery—where people primarily access news by tuning in to a specific television channel, listening to a specific radio programme, or relying on a specific newspaper, news site, or app—to an increased reliance on distributed discovery—where many people find and access news via platform services such as social media, search engines, video sharing sites, aggregators, and messaging applications—in itself influence national levels of trust in news?

Many journalists, editors, and publishers certainly think so (Ross Arguedas et al., 2022). In this paper, we rely on online survey data collected from 2015 to 2021 across 46 countries (N=485,000) to investigate whether they are right. We find that they are—at least when it comes to growth in the use of social media for news. By using random effects within-between (REWB) models specifically designed to analyse cross-sectional comparative longitudinal survey data, we find that (i) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015 in the countries covered (with very different patterns in different countries), and (ii) that—while there is some limited evidence of differences by media system—national differences are much better explained by changes in news media use. Specifically, within-country declines in television news use over time—and parallel increases in social media news use—are significantly associated with declines in trust in news. Thus, while many other factors—including interpersonal trust, trust in institutions, and political factors such as polarization and elite cues (Hanitzsch et al., 2017; Ladd, 2012; Strömbäck et al., 2020)—may also influence trust, the rise of social media as a way of accessing news seems to have contributed to current declines.

Why do changing levels of social media and television use influence levels of trust in news? In short, our argument is that television news is driven by self-selection, rooted in habit, comes predominantly from familiar brands, and often offers—for lack of better words—simplicity and clarity. News on social media, on the other hand, is often driven by incidental exposure and automated serendipity, sometimes comes from brands people don’t use actively, are unfamiliar with, or may actively dislike, and often offers—for lack of better words—complexity and confusion. This difference, we think, helps account for our findings here.

In a sense, some of the very features of television news critics have long decried (e.g., dominated by long-established “mainstream media”, little space for nuance, etc.) may have helped engender trust in news, and some of the very features of social media often held up as positive contributions (e.g., incidental exposure leading people to more and more diverse sources of news) may at the same time erode trust. The American CBS evening news presenter Walter Cronkite’s legendary sign-off “and that's the way it is” captures some of the authority television news has often assumed, in striking contrast to the diversity and disagreement often experienced on social media.

References
Hanitzsch, T., van Dalen, A., & Steindl, N. (2017). Caught in the Nexus: A Comparative and Longitudinal Analysis of Public Trust in the Press. International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(1), 3–23.
Ladd, J. M. (2012). Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters. Princeton University Press.
Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Schulz, A., Robertson, C. T., Eddy, K., & Nielsen, R. K. (2022). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022
Ross Arguedas, A., Badrinathan, S., Mont’Alverne, C., Toff, B., Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2022). “It’s a Battle You Are Never Going to Win”: Perspectives from Journalists in Four Countries on How Digital Media Platforms Undermine Trust in News. Journalism Studies, 23(14), 1821–1840.
Strömbäck, J., Tsfati, Y., Boomgaarden, H., Damstra, A., Lindgren, E., Vliegenthart, R., & Lindholm, T. (2020). News Media Trust and its Impact on Media Use: Toward a Framework for Future Research. Annals of the International Communication Association, 44(2), 139–156

Authors

• Richard Fletcher, University of Oxford

• Simge Andi, University of Oxford

• Kirsten Eddy, Pew Research Center

• Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

• Camila Mont'Alverne, University of Strathclyde

• Craig Robertson, University of Oxford

• Amy Ross Arguedas, University of Oxford

• Anne Schulz, University of Zurich

• Benjamin Toff, University of Minnesota

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford