Reuters reports on a survey of attitudes toward media that was done in ten countries:
One-quarter of consumers abandoned a news source over the past year because they lost trust in its reporting, according to a new survey that also found the BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera the most trusted brands in their respective home regions.
[M]edia worldwide were trusted by an average of 61 percent of respondents compared with 52 percent who said they trusted their governments.
“National TV is still the most trusted news source by a wide margin, although the Internet is gaining ground among the young,” said Doug Miller, president of London-based research firm GlobeScan, which conducted the polling.
Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.
The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain’s publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world’s biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc.
I infer that Americans are ahead of most nations in skepticism toward media outlets. Further, Americans’ trust is widely diffused. It’s interesting that Fox News led the survey, but it’s more notable, I think, that no news provider in the U.S. polled over 11%. That’s evidence of a diverse and competitive market for news.
Via Power Line News.
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