Tuning out TV news might be behind the decline in media trust. (No, really!)

A new wide-ranging study finds that trust in news has fallen further in countries where television news use has declined, as well as in countries where more people are turning to social media for news.

Richard Fletcher, director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), and co-authors analyzed data from 46 countries over a decade and found that “as media environments became less characterized by television news use, and increasingly characterized by social media news use, this was associated with a decline in trust.”

But — alert, important caveat — “it is important to acknowledge that the analysis we present here cannot identify the direction of causation.”

In other words, “the link between media use and trust is clear, but it is difficult to use the data to identify which changes first,” Fletcher explained to me in an email. “Does falling trust cause people to change their media use, or do changing media habits cause lower trust?”

Fletcher believes the answer is likely “a bit of both,” but pointed out that other researchers have found “stronger evidence for changing media habits causing changes to trust.”

From the paper, published late last month in the Journal of Communication:

Some of the very features of television news critics have long decried (e.g., dominated by long-established “mainstream media,” little space for nuance, one-way transmission with no space for counter-speech, etc) may have helped engender trust in news, and some of the very features of social media often held up as positive contributions (e.g., incidental exposure leading people to more and more diverse sources of news, greater opportunities for participation) may at the same time erode trust. The American CBS evening news presenter Walter Cronkite’s legendary sign-off “and that’s the way it is” captures some of the authority television news has often assumed, in striking contrast to the diversity and disagreement often experienced on social media.

Second caveat alert: That finding applies to countries with relatively high levels of press freedom. The authors didn’t include a sufficient number of countries where press freedom is seriously compromised to draw conclusions, but write that their sample indicates government control over mainstream media would invert the dynamic. In countries with state-controlled television news, more people may trust social media news, the authors note.

Falling trust in news has been the subject of a lot of polls, surveys, and academic research. We’ve covered a fair number of those for Nieman Lab. But Fletcher saw an opportunity to leverage data from RISJ’s annual Digital News Reports and use a different lens.

“Previous research has often seen people’s trust in news as an extension of their attitudes towards politics,” Fletcher told me in an email. “We were interested in whether changes to the media environment itself might help explain some of the changes to trust we have seen in recent years.”

The paper found that — on average, across all countries studied — certain groups are more likely to trust news, including women, older people, and people without university degrees. That relationship doesn’t always hold when the results are broken down by country and year, however, suggesting “there is no simple, universal reason for why these groups have higher trust overall,” Fletcher noted.

In the United States, Fox News is highly trusted by Republicans and research shows many Republicans often don’t trust other mainstream news outlets. Fletcher says that America is “something of an outlier” in this regard.

“Some countries do have a strong partisan divide when it comes to trust in news — but many do not,” Fletcher said. “In many European countries television news aims to be, or is required to be, impartial.”

As for future research questions, Fletcher noted one next step would be identifying what features of social media and television news use, precisely, affect people’s trust. “For example,” he asked, “does the criticism from users that often surrounds news on some social platforms affect people’s trust in it?”