Rebuilding trust in the media

Trust in the media is at an all-time low in many countries.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report found that people don't trust the media in 14 of the 28 countries it surveyed. These 14 countries include the U.S., U.K., France, and Brazil.

The report also found that most people think news organizations would:

• Prefer to attract a big audience than tell people what they want to know
• Rather support an ideology than inform the public

Meanwhile, a 2025 Gallup poll found that 34% of Americans have no trust at all in mass media. This figure was only 12% in 2005.

This article begins by looking at research that shows why it's critical that people have trust in the media and why it has declined.

We then examine expert advice on how journalists, media organizations, and policymakers can rebuild trust in the media.

In a democracy, people need reliable information to make informed political decisions.

Declining trust in mass media can lead more people to turn to other sources of information, such as social media or partisan outlets, which may be less accurate.

Further, they're more likely to choose media outlets that reinforce their beliefs.

This can accelerate the spread of disinformation and alternative, unverified, and false versions of events. This can then further erode media trust, hinder policymaking in governments and public institutions, and affect the management of public crises.

Mistrust in the media can have economic consequences too. In a chapter in the book Trust, Media, and the Economy, the authors highlight that credible media can boost public confidence in the economy.

They say it "leads to increased consumer spending, investment, and economic growth."

We've already highlighted that exposure to disinformation, which has become more widespread in recent years, can erode the public's trust in the media.

Technology, editorial decisions, and political criticism are also factors.

Technology

Technology has been a key driver of disinformation. But this isn't the only impact that tech has on the rising mistrust of the media.

A study on perceptions of media credibility in the information age states that the wide adoption of new technology often changes opinions of "older" media. This may even happen when most people don't have access to new technology, which was the case with the Internet when the study was published in 2001.

More recently, researchers have suggested that social media and other newer media platforms that provide alternative sources of information are major factors in declining trust in established media.

Further, social science researcher Rachel E. Moran highlights that gatekeeping institutions and people may be less transparent online than offline. Therefore, it may be more difficult for audiences to assess trustworthiness in digital media.

Editorial choices

"News outlets can damage trust when they adopt fervent agenda-setting to influence the public agenda on certain controversial topics," says Sallyanne Duncan in Ethics for Journalists.

She adds, "journalists can also be deemed untrustworthy if their reporting is consistently inaccurate, discriminatory, gratuitous, or sensational."

She states that the effects of their actions extend to the media as a whole, citing how the public lost trust in the British press as a result of the 2011 phone-hacking scandal involving News Corp tabloids in the U.K.

Political attacks

In 2017, less than a month after his first inauguration, President Trump said that certain publishers were "the enemy of the people" in one of many negative comments about the media.

But political criticism of the media isn't new.

In New Directions in Media and Politics, Jonathan M. Ladd and Alexander R. Podkul highlight that Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a series of speeches in the late 1960s and early 1970s attacking the institutional news media. Since then, attacks on the media have become more intense and more common, especially among right-leaning politicians and activists.

They conclude that trust in the media as an institution has declined as the news media have become a topic of political debate.

Many causes of media mistrust aren't going away.

So what can journalists, media organizations, and policymakers do to rebuild audience trust?

Be more transparent

In a chapter about credibility and trust in the media in the book The Broadcast News Toolkit, Kirsten Johnson and Jodi Radosh cite that most people don't know what journalists do.

As a result, they would like journalists and newsrooms to be more transparent.

Ways they can do this include:

• Highlighting and linking to sources and documents used in stories
• Explaining the "how" and "why" of stories, which anticipate audience questions and queries
• Showing how their organization is funded and any potential conflicts of interest
• Providing short bios about journalists and contributors, including photos and information about their careers and lives, if appropriate and safe to do
• Clearly highlighting journalists' and contributors' previous work
• Providing ways to contact journalists and contributors
• Explaining editorial processes and ethical standards, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI)

Promote media literacy

Governments and policymakers should do more to promote media literacy to help rebuild trust, say Joanna Paliszkiewicz and Jerzy Gołuchowski in Trust, Media and the Economy.

They suggest:

• Implementing media literacy programs in schools and communities
• Running campaigns to raise awareness about the role of media and the importance of supporting trustworthy media outlets

Strengthen regulation

Paliszkiewicz and Gołuchowski also suggest implementing or updating regulations to hold media organizations and tech companies accountable for the spread of disinformation and misinformation.

Further, in the book Global Business Environment, author Mansi Kapoor argues that we need to disrupt the financial incentives behind disinformation with stricter advertising standards and by encouraging advertisers to support trusted sources.

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