Lack of trust is our biggest issue

Forget the World Cup, for news nerds this week has brought unbridled excitement – and the need for a few hydration breaks, no doubt – after the publication of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026.

The headlines were all about social media and video (54%) overtaking traditional news sites (51%) as the source of news for a majority of people worldwide. It’s a landmark moment, of course, but something that many will have seen coming for a few years now if they’ve been reading the annual reports and watching the world around them.

Something that is not a crossover point but one I want to highlight is the ever-decreasing trust in news that the survey reveals. It’s down to its lowest point ever at 37%. Think about it for a second: less than four out of 10 people worldwide trust the news we are giving them. Obviously, in some countries it’s better, but in others it’s much worse. In America only 25% trust the news.

These are figures for users’ opinion of news generally. If anything it’s even worse when you ask people about the news they use themselves. By this measure, only 44% trust it. Some 22% say they don’t trust their own choice of news, which is odd in itself. Why would you read, watch or listen to a news source you didn’t trust?

Either way, this is a crisis that needs addressing right away. Many news organisations have consoled themselves that in a world of AI-produced content they will stand out because people will know they can believe what they’re reading, watching or listening as it has come from an established news brand. They will take comfort, the argument goes, in knowing that it has been verified by human journalists and editors. But that won’t be the case if readers decide they don’t trust our brands – and, at the moment, more don’t than do.

The great danger is that users decide that they don’t see an appreciable difference between AI-produced and human-produced content. Especially when the former becomes much more reliable, as it undoubtedly will. News organisations have to show they are demonstrably different and more trustworthy.

Maybe news is suffering from the general decline in trust in institutions, but we have to try to do something about it, right?

I have an inkling that an answer comes in one of the articles that accompanies the main Reuters report. It was by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, former head of the Reuters Institute and now a professor at Copenhagen University. He wrote about how audiences view the impartiality of news sources.

In his piece is a nugget which should give us pause. While 45% of people say they prefer getting their news from a source that does not have a particular point of view, the 22% who prefer an angle are, bluntly, our super users. They access news many times daily, they are more likely to pay for online news, they share and comment more than others and are more likely to say they are very interested in news and politics.

Naturally, news organisations want to be responsive to their readers and the super users described above are pretty clear in what they want. But that means we leave the near-majority, who prefer impartial news, feeling frustrated and understandably feeling the news is less than trustworthy.

It will, I imagine, be very difficult for avowedly partial news organisations to change tack towards impartiality. Fox News isn’t going to move towards the centre; equally, nor is The Guardian. But for news start-ups or organisations that are more centrist to start with, there could be an opportunity here.

Having had some conversations, I know that some executives fear that being impartial might feel bland and be difficult to sell. But I don’t think that’s an insuperable challenge, especially when there is clearly a market out there waiting to be served. And the knock-on effect might be the increase in trust for news that we, and society, desperately need.

I feel like a broken record on this, but it is also not something that can be put off. Trust in news will not recover on its own. We need to try things – for example, showing our working, explaining our standards, increased communication with users more generally, telling them what we don’t know – and try them now.

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Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]