Trust in news falls to record low, Reuters Institute finds

Public trust in news has hit its lowest point since records began, with new research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism revealing that confidence in the media has continued its long downward slide heading into 2025.

The annual Digital News Report, which surveys more than 95,000 people across 47 countries, found that just 40 percent of respondents said they trusted most news most of the time. That’s down from figures that once sat comfortably in the mid-forties when the study launched a decade ago. A slow bleed has become something harder to ignore.

A decade of declining confidence

The Reuters Institute has been tracking public attitudes toward news since 2015. Back then, trust levels were already far from flattering, but they were stable. What followed was a gradual erosion shaped by political polarisation, the rise of social media, and a string of high-profile journalistic failures that stuck in the public memory. By 2024, the numbers had reached a floor that researchers didn’t expect to see broken. Then 2025 came along and broke it.

The decline isn’t uniform. Some countries are faring worse than others. The United States, where trust in news sits at just 32 percent, continues to rank among the lowest of the nations surveyed. Greece and Hungary also post troubling figures. But Nordic countries, particularly Finland, remain relative bright spots, with trust levels running more than 20 percentage points above the global average.

Avoidance is rising too

It’s not just trust that’s falling. News avoidance — people actively choosing not to follow current events — has climbed sharply. Around 39 percent of those surveyed said they often or sometimes avoid the news. That’s up significantly from a decade ago. Respondents cited emotional exhaustion, repetitive coverage, and a sense that nothing they read makes any difference.

So people aren’t just distrusting the news. They’re walking away from it.

What the industry is saying

Reactions from within journalism have ranged from soul-searching to defensiveness. “These findings are a serious warning and the industry needs to take them seriously rather than explaining them away,” said one senior media executive familiar with the report’s findings. “Audiences aren’t wrong to feel let down in some cases. We have to earn that trust back, and that takes time.”

The report also flagged concerns about the role of artificial intelligence in accelerating distrust. More than half of respondents said they were worried about distinguishing real news from AI-generated content online. That anxiety is feeding a broader scepticism that doesn’t always discriminate between reliable outlets and unreliable ones.

What comes next

The Reuters Institute is expected to release targeted recommendations alongside the full report later this year. Researchers are pointing to transparency measures, stronger editorial standards, and direct community engagement as potential paths forward. Whether news organisations have the appetite — and the resources — to act on any of it remains an open question. Trust, once lost, has a habit of being very slow to return.