The solution to shockingly low public trust is a diverse media landscape

Opinion

An OECD survey found that the UK has the lowest level of trust in news media. Let that be a warning to Sir Keir Starmer, who needs to encourage and strengthen a plural and independent media sector.

By any standards, it has been a remarkable period for news — political, social and sporting.

There was the election and the aftermath, with a landslide for Labour on a turnout of 52% — the lowest since universal suffrage was introduced in 1928. Nigel Farage’s Reform party managed to attract more than 4m votes on the back of a single incendiary policy.

There was the psycho-drama of whether US president Joe Biden was fit for a second term after dramatic, awful performances on TV and whether Democratic grandees would move against him.

Then along came Thomas Matthew Crooks, who came within an inch of assassinating former US president Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Just as the implications of the attack were being mulled over, it was time for a dramatic day of sport, with Carlos Alcaraz winning his second Wimbledon final by the age of 21 and then on to England playing but not quite well enough to beat Spain in the Euro final.

Low trust

It was an effort to keep up with it all, so it is understandable if you missed the weighty 2024 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions. It is hardly a page-turner, but it is interesting if unsurprising to see that across the 30 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 44% have low or no trust in their national governments, with only 39% on average expressing trust.

Equally unsurprising is that the UK comes far down the batting order in terms of trust in government, although slightly more than that of Czechia.

It is when you reach section five — “Trust and information integrity” — that the survey, based on interviews with 2,000 people in each country, gets significant.

There is an irritating shortage of precise numbers, but a bar chart makes it absolutely clear that trust in the media in the UK is the lowest in the 30 countries surveyed.

Overall, 39% of individuals in OECD countries surveyed have high or moderately high trust in news media, matching levels of trust in government.

Only 19% in the UK have a high level of trust in media — lower than in Greece or Chile.

Implications for democracy

It is difficult to say what such numbers thrown up from a survey actually mean — except that they cannot be good news, even if we are only dealing in relativities.

The OECD notes how, in recent years, concerns over the reliability and integrity of information have grown, with significant implications for democracy.

The trend has come at the same time as the rise of social media, the consolidation of media into increasingly large groups, the fragmentation of audiences amid a proliferation of channels and the rise of deliberate providers of disinformation.

In the UK, the sometimes eye-wateringly partisan nature of much of the press cannot have helped — the papers that campaigned for Brexit, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak with undiminished enthusiasm until the end.

As the OECD puts it in something close to a truism: “The undermining of a common reality based on factual evidence deepens societal divisions and makes it more difficult to build the consensus necessary to address policy challenges.”

The OECD barely mentions the policy challenges that are difficult to address, but trying to do something about climate change, Brexit and socially divisive inequalities will do, for a start.

Conspiracy theories

Unfortunately, the survey does not deal with one of the founding OECD members — the US — presumably because a survey of 2,000 would not even begin to touch the sides of such a huge and divided country.

If a comprehensive survey were to be carried out in the US, it might show trust in news media bumping along at the same level as in the UK, although it would depend very much on who you asked.

The attack on Trump has released a rich variety of conspiracy theories on the internet and elsewhere. Some said it was obviously staged to boost Trump’s poll ratings — an unlikely thing, although bizarrely his ratings have improved just because he has been shot at.

Others thought that it was the fault of the dangerous liberal left. Or as Donald Trump Jr put it: “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.”

This approach was undermined by the fact that the 20-year-old Crooks was a registered Republican and his motives for the moment remain unknown.

Diverse, plural, independent

Back in the real world, finding solutions for the problems of legitimacy of both news media and government institutions verge on the nebulous.

One challenge for the media is to communicate information, particularly economic information, in ways that benefit people with different levels of knowledge.

The OECD also argues for promoting policies that “support a diverse, plural and independent media sector with a needed emphasis on local journalism”.

Yes, indeed. But how to do that?

In the UK, the new prime minister will be keen to establish his own sense of trust despite his large majority — a trust that was badly damaged by the antics of Johnson and the insane economic policies of Truss.

Sir Keir Starmer would also benefit from encouraging and strengthening a plural and independent media, including more encouragement for greater financial and journalistic independence for the BBC.

As the OECD argues, the results of the survey suggests that governments have an interest “in ensuring the public is able and encouraged to access news in a plural and diverse media landscape”.

It may not sound like much, but it would be a start.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — read his column here.