Mediawatch looks at the results of the biggest annual survey of New Zealanders' trust in news - which shows it's on the slide for the fourth year in a row. For the first time it also shows many of us avoiding news altogether. Is that because so much of it has been 'bad news' for so long? Or are we doing it badly? Mediawatch the authors of the 2023 Trust in News report.

Mediawatch looks at the results of the biggest annual survey of New Zealanders' trust in news - which shows it's on the slide for the fourth year in a row. For the first time it also shows many of us avoiding news altogether. Is that because so much of it has been 'bad news' for so long? Or are we doing it badly? Mediawatch talks to the authors of the 2023 Trust in News report.

Every year international communications company Edelman creates a 'trust barometer' from surveys about institutions, governments and companies in 27 countries.

In almost all of them, it recorded annual declines of trust in all sources of general news and information.

It was the same again this year.

"A shared media environment has given way to echo chambers, making it harder to collaboratively solve problems. Media is not trusted, with especially low trust in social media," the report found.

"To a large extent in New Zealand we have kept (trust) but you can feel it fraying. You can feel the influences of polarisation, for example, out of the US which plays in everybody's media - and that's putting news pressure on as well," former PM Helen Clark said at the launch of the 2023 Trust Barometer in January.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY1VDIDwlcw&t=620s

New Zealand isn't among the countries Edelman surveys, but a survey by a local affiliate last year found trust in media here at just 41 percent, well below Edelman's global average of 50.

Perhaps worse, a majority considered media here to be "a divisive force" in society.

But the actual report actually told a different story about news.

The fine print said the question about divisiveness was only put to half of the sample, trust in all media was up and 58 percent chose 'traditional news media' as a trusted source - a greater proportion than in the US, Japan or Australia.

So how low is trust today really?

Since 2020, the most comprehensive annual survey of New Zealanders' trust in news has been carried out by the AUT 's Centre for Journalism Media and Democracy.

It uses Horizon Research for the data gathering and a survey of 46 other countries by international news agency Reuters. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details