The unseen truth about global trust in news

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By Luba Kassova and Richard Addy

(Luba Kassova is a media expert, researcher, journalist, and co-founder of AKAS, who covers social and media trends, democracy, AI and equality. Richard Addy is a co-founder of AKAS, strategist, international media consultant, and a former chief advisor to the BBC’s Deputy Director General who ran BBC News. This piece was commissioned as part of the campaign to mark World News Day on September 28, 2025.)

Trust is the currency which makes democracies and societies function, the social glue that binds people and structures together. Undermining trust in the governance system, in institutions, in media and between people is an early step in any authoritarian’s plan for destroying democracy.

Given that news media’s narrative about itself is important in shaping public opinion, it is noteworthy that for over a decade global news media has largely argued that trust in news is declining. AKAS’ analysis of over 500,000 online news articles published since January 2020, using the GDELT global news database, revealed that terms emphasizing declining trust in news featured six times more frequently than those suggesting stability or increased trust.

To test the collective wisdom further for World News Day aimed at amplifying the value of fact-based journalism, we asked ChatGPT to summarise the global trend for trust in news in the last five years. Its answer confirmed a negative lens, stating that global trust in news had generally declined due to sustained erosion driven by “misinformation, political polarisation and news avoidance.”

In short, this narrative of decline is among the least contested and most repeated beliefs in journalism. But is it true? To find out, we interrogated seven leading surveys covering news trends.

The analysis discovered that blanket statements about decline in global trust in news are inherently inaccurate and overly negative. Whilst in the US, trust in news has collapsed since the 1970s, this is not reflected much in the rest of the world, especially in the last five years when trust in news has often risen. What this reflects instead is a tendency for media to project trends observed in the US as global phenomena.

Over the last decade the UK public’s trust in news media has been amongst the lowest. However, since 2020 UK trust levels have stabilised or even crept up. Moreover, despite being low, Ipsos’ Veracity Index, corroborated by research from YouGov, shows that the UK public’s trust in journalists has risen from 23% in 2020 to 27% currently.

AKAS analysis of Reuters Institute’s  Digital News Report (DNR), Edelman Trust Barometer, The World Values Survey and Eurobarometer shows two distinct trends in trust in news in the last decade, with the start of the Covid pandemic being a watershed moment.

Between 2015 and 2020 the trend in trust in news was inconclusive: two of the sources broadly showed a decline while the other two generally showed rises. The global picture has been more positive in the last five years with all three sources measuring trust since 2020 showing stable or increasing public trust in news. For example, in 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer reported an average trust in media of 52% across 28 countries – the highest ever recorded by Edelman.

Trust in news is amongst the highest in the Nordic countries. The DNR reveals that 67% of adults in Finland and 56% in Denmark trust news most of the time, with trust increasing by 11 and 10 percentage points respectively since 2020. This success story gets lost in the prevalent yet unfounded negative narratives. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Professor of Communication at University of Copenhagen, highlights three factors contributing to the consistently high trust in Nordic media: higher trust levels between people in the region, greater trust in institutions, and a smaller proportion of people using social media as their main news source. “The relatively stronger connection Nordic publishers have been able to earn and maintain helps underpin trust as, when it comes to news, people tend to trust outlets they routinely use,” concludes Nielsen.

The DNR and Edelman also show high trust in news in other countries since 2000 including in Nigeria and Kenya. The 2025 DNR shows 68% of adults in Nigeria and 65% in Kenya trust the news most of the time, a 15-percentage point increase for Kenya since 2020. Pamella Sittoni, Public Editor at The Nation Media Group in Kenya, attributes the rise in media trust in part to a history of credible private media considered relatively independent from state influence, and in part to a large population of educated young people who cross-check what they read on social media or websites by visiting traditional trusted sources. “There’s been considerable reduction of trust in the government and even in the now fragmented religious groups, which has left the media as the key purveyor of truth,” she says.

Undoubtedly there is much that news media can do better to grow public trust, but the blanket claim that global trust in news is in decline is erroneous and plays into authoritarians’ plans to destroy trust in independent media. To protect truth and democracy we must resist regurgitating unduly negative interpretations and just turn to the facts.