The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
This week we look, in our Engagement Hub, at new findings around falling trust in the media. We ask how you tread the right line, between a society that believes everything it reads, and one which has no common reference points.
And of course, there’s the Friday newsstand of misleading headlines that is Charlie’s Attic, with a compilation of the most memorable political goodbyes as a nod to this week’s extraordinary domestic events. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu.
Believing what you read
We were struck by recent analysis of trust in news brands. Reported on the site Press Gazette, and based on a longer report by Reuters, the findings show a marked decline in trust for media outlets. As the chart below shows (taken from the research) the UK has been hit particularly hard in the past few years (although the US is still top of the ‘low trust’ league table when it comes to the media). Running alongside this, according to the report, has been a rise in the proportion who ignore news altogether.
At one level, the results are not surprising. A series of public blows to trust have occurred in the past decade, alongside the rise of social media platforms. COVID-19 arguably didn’t help, creating high levels of news fatigue, and leading to a rise in online conspiracism.
Political polarisation has also led to titles becoming more partisan, allowing them to retain a core audience but affecting their credibility outside this base. It is arguably no surprise that The Sun, the Daily Mail and The Mirror are among the least trusted publications, given that these are among the most politically strident titles in the UK.
Most surprising, perhaps, are the figures for the BBC, trust in whom remains high but has dropped a massive 20 percentage points in the past four years.
At one level, these findings might be a relief for some. Those on the left will no doubt see it as a good thing if people are less likely to believe what they read in the Daily Mail – or even to read the Mail at all. Yet we should perhaps be careful what we wish for here.
The decline across the board of universally trusted sources could ultimately lead to a very fragmented field – where there are fewer accepted truths and less facts upon which ‘we can all agree’. The beneficiaries might be alternative news outlets, who feel even less beholden to promote the truth, and who instead specialise in confirming a range of political biases.
These are the big challenges of the modern world, and they are issues which afflict organisations like councils as well, when they try to engage with hard-to-reach communities or build positive messages. A credulous society, where people ‘believe what they read’ is clearly not a good thing. But one wonders if the opposite sort of society, where people believe only what they want to believe, is any better.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, where today’s headlines become tomorrow’s chip-paper:
Master the art of the media enquiry – in three steps.
