It has not been a good few years for print media. As of 2021, just 24% of news consumers said they’d used it to keep up with events in the last week, although that is a small recovery on the 20% 2020 saw.

Radio media is not looking healthy either and is currently at its lowest levels yet. The drop hasn’t been as sharp as print’s, but it’s certainly heading in the same direction.

Meanwhile, online news has remained relatively stable since 2016, with social media slowly creeping up. Interestingly, TV media took a bit of a tumble in 2020, and could be a sign of a shift to platforms like YouTube.

That’s the picture from 46 different countries though. Things don’t look the same everywhere.

Across these six countries we see vast differences. In Germany and France, people get their news from TV as much as they do online, but in Singapore far more people get it online than from the television. But on the flip side, Germany and Singapore’s print news media is relatively healthy compared to those of France, the UK, and the US.

Germany’s high levels of radio news consumption is notable too, and not just compared to the countries in the table. Their 40% is the third highest in the world, coming behind Kenya’s 44%, and South Africa’s 41%.

A matter of trust

Now we know where people get their news, it’s time to see if they actually trust the information they get.

Looking back over the last few years, trust in news and news sources has remained fairly stable aside from a dip for news in general in 2020. That has since recovered, and we can see that trust went up in all four categories in 2021.

You might note that these numbers are quite low. It does seem surprising that only 50% of people trust the news they actually consume. Then again, it depends how you interpret it. Are people consuming news they know to be false and not caring, or are they simply employing a skeptical mindset? Hopefully the latter.

One worrying aspect is the lack of trust in news from social media when we consider 56% of people consume news this way. That’s a lot of news people are seeing that they don’t actually trust. Could this have a detrimental effect on how people view the news in general?

Now let’s take a look at the same data for specific countries.

Trust in news is clearly not equal across the board. Germany has relatively high levels of trust, ranking 9th in the world (Portugal are top with 61%). Meanwhile the United States has the lowest level of all the countries surveyed.

It’s beyond us to identify and explain all the reasons for this, but it’s interesting to note that in terms of news sources, the big difference between Germany and the US is that far more Germans get their news from print and radio media. We wonder if this plays a role in their opposing trust levels.

Staying with the US, we wanted to see how levels of trust in the news have changed over time. We’ve included the UK to see how things compare.

While the US has seen trust levels fall since 2017, they’re essentially where they were in 2015. The UK on the other hand has seen a much more dramatic drop. Over half of news consumers in the UK trusted the news in 2015, while in 2021 it’s just over a third.

While this is a recovery on 2020’s 28%, it still shows a significant shift in how the news is viewed in the country. News publications in the UK have to ask themselves how they can turn things around and stop the decline.

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team