Trust in news increases worldwide during pandemic: report

Trust in the news increased worldwide during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report published Wednesday.

The 2021 Reuters Institute Digital News Report said trust in the news has grown by an average of 6 percentage points across the 46 countries it surveyed. About 44 percent of respondents said they trust the news most of the time.

It’s a different story in the United States, however, where 29 percent of respondents said the same. The U.S. signaled the lowest trust in the news of the countries polled. The report did not say how much that number had changed since the pandemic began.

Of the countries polled, Finland reported the highest trust in news at 65 percent.

“Political divides fuel much of this mistrust in the United States, with those who self-identify on the right being more than twice as likely to distrust the news compared with those on the left. Resentment and anger are stoked by polarised TV networks such as right-leaning Fox News, One America News, and Newsmax and left-leaning CNN and MSNBC,” the report noted.

Additionally, the report said concerns over misinformation worldwide jumped 2 percentage points to 58 percent. Concern over misinformation was highest in Africa at 74 percent and lowest in Europe at 54 percent.

Of the most false or misleading information people claimed seeing, 54 percent of respondents said it was about the coronavirus. 

About 43 percent of people reported seeing misleading information about politics, 29 percent about celebrities, 20 percent about products and services, and 20 percent about climate change.

YouGov and its partners used online questionnaires to conduct their research on 46 countries, which was done at the end of January and beginning of February. The report stressed that since answers were reported online, it’s better to think of them as more representative of the online population of these countries.