We’re losing trust and interest in current affairs. What should be done?
Opinion
From a local to a global level, trust in news is in decline. The impact may be felt all the way to 10 Downing Street, writes Ray Snoddy.
Trust in news is in decline, according to the Reuters Institute For The Study of Journalism’s annual international survey- often for very good reason.
At a local level, in this case, the constituency of Makerfield, where tomorrow’s consequential by-election is to be played out, an analysis by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) found a four-fold increase in local Facebook groups spreading misinformation.
If the former mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, wins and returns to the House of Commons, a Labour Party leadership contest could be triggered, putting Sir Keir Starmer’s job security in serious jeopardy.
After examining over 1,800 posts across four local Facebook groups, SMF found that the share of posts containing misinformation rose from 4% before the by-election was called to 16% during the campaign. Most were negative to Labour or pro-Reform.
In one of the groups, five of the top 10 posts were misinformation. They ranged from fake images of local streets lined with Reform flags and Labour and Green hot-air balloons flying over Makerfield to false allegations about Andy Burnham’s wife.
The SMF analysis notes that the accounts sharing fake news are mostly new, have few friends and no profile pictures.
Who stands to benefit?
While it is impossible to be sure who or what is responsible, Reform UK stands to benefit most from these activities.
From Reform’s point of view, an unpopular Sir Keir would give them the best chance of winning a General Election, while a Burnham government could be more difficult to defeat.
To counter the impact of platforms pumping out fake news, the SMF yesterday called for an expansion of the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporter Service, where journalists are funded by the BBC but work for local news organisations.
The Foundation would also like to see the communications regulator, Ofcom, test and publish assessments of how well platforms such as Facebook tackle fake news. It argues that the platforms should prioritise content from verified news organisations and flag up false or suspicious content.
As it happens, despite the peddling of false information, the smart money is on Burnham winning the by-election because the far-right vote is split between Reform and the more extreme Restore. If that happens, cue mayhem in Westminster.
The global view on trust from Reuters
From the micro to the macro, and back to the publication of Reuters’ latest global report on digital news and trust. The survey covers 48 markets and 100,000 respondents.
The dual headline is that social and video platforms have overtaken TV or news website apps as a source of news consumption for the first time, while trust in news is at a record low since the survey began in 2015.
At the same time, interest in news has continued to fall over the past five years – most notably in the UK.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out that there just might be a connection between those trends.
Over the past five years -post-pandemic – TV viewership has dropped from 64% to 52% while news website traffic has fallen from 63% to 52%.
Meanwhile, over the same period, social and video networks have increased their traffic to 54%, up 3% from the past year.
The trends are moving slowly – social and video had been as high as 56%, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Globally, 30% of people say social media and video networks are their main source of news, up from 22% five years ago.
The upward trend is underlined by the demographics
Over half (52%) of those aged between 18 and 24 said social, video and AI chatbots were their main source of news, while among 25-34-year-olds, the number is up to 44%.
The grim news continues, with the proportion of those who say they are extremely or very interested in the news dropping by 13 percentage points globally over the past five years, from 59% to less than 46%.
The decline is much steeper in the UK, down by 33 percentage points from 70% in 2015 to 37%, while trust in the news has fallen by five percentage points to a shocking 30%.
The UK situation is, however, complex, and it is difficult to join up the dots between the paradoxes. Consumers may be using social media and expressing a general lack of trust in the news, but many are seriously concerned about fake news and misinformation.
In fact, concerns about social media are among the highest anywhere, with 77% of Brits expressing concern.
Those worries, particularly about the impact on under-16s, have fed into government concerns and led to this week’s announcement of plans to introduce urgent legislation to ban under-16s from most major social media platforms.
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The move is controversial, and so far, details are scarce on how it will be implemented and enforced. At least for now, the UK is taking the most dramatic action to try to protect under-16s from the damaging effects of social media use.
On the whole, trust in the UK’s main TV brands remains robust and well ahead of the popular press.
BBC News is at 59% trust, followed by Channel 4 at 57%, the same score as ITV News, with Sky News on 50%.
GB News is the outlier, trusted by 27%, with 46% not trusting the channel.
What were once broadsheets do better on trust than the populars, with the Financial Times at 56%, followed by The Daily Telegraph at 43% and The Times at 48%.
The Sun scores a miserable 15% in trust levels, behind the Daily Mail at 23% and the Daily Mirror at 21%.
But what is to be done about the central paradox that more people are using social media while in many cases trusting it less?
The SMF’s suggestions following its Makerfield research are as good a place to start as any.
More BBC-funded local reporters, more Ofcom assessments of how well the platforms tackle fake news, while the platforms themselves should badge and prioritise content from verified news organisations.
Modest first steps maybe, but necessary ones to increase consumer trust in the news over time.
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 — bookmark his column here.