A NATION – NO, A WORLD – INFLAMED over racial injustice … rampant disease wreaking worldwide havoc but provoking feckless denial and inaction from authorities … many populations’ livelihoods in ruins. At such a time, the transformed media ecosystem must assuredly take serious stock of its responsibilities.

Not a moment too soon for such self-reflection, there comes from one of the world’s leading news agencies, Reuters, another of the Digital News Reports that are published annually by the Reuters Institute. 

While Reuters itself (more formally Thomson Reuters since 2008 when acquired by Canadian multinational Thomson Corporation) is headquartered in a sleek 32-story glass-lined building in New York’s Times Square, its non-profit Institute is based in England, as part of Oxford University. But it’s no remote ivory tower; it diligently acts as the agency’s independent center for real-life research, and data-based policy review. It could be claimed to act as the industry’s and the profession’s conscience.

Its report was presented this week (online, of course, to a worldwide audience primarily of journalists) by the Institute’s Director, Rasmus Nielsen (right) – who is a worthy, incisive successor, I will say in full disclosure of some personal, inevitably favorable bias, to John Lloyd (below left), the Institute’s original co-founder. (Lloyd once authoritatively co-hosted with me a provocative, investigative TV program in London.) Nielsen has this year directed a thorough-going survey of developments in online journalism across 40 markets spread across the globe. It was conducted in large part before COVID19 fully made its mark – but it has been assiduously updated to take in the pandemic’s full devastating impact.

One unavoidable matter is fully addressed. Trust in the news media has been damagingly eroded as public polarization has deepened, and this has been exacerbated by the triple-threat of disease, recession and racism. That’s not news to any citizen on the planet, I dare say, but the Reuters survey analyses this distrust’s nature and extent – carefully, pointedly and subtly.

When the Institute polled people in its 40 chosen countries back in January, fewer than four in ten (38%) said they ‘trust most news most of the time’ – which represents a drop in trust of four percentage points since its report last year.

Even when asked specifically about the news-media people deliberately choose to use themselves, the trust level was still less than half, at  46%.

The Institute’s researchers conclude that the growing political polarization among populations almost everywhere (associated, they seem sure, with rising social and economic uncertainty) is undermining faith in all mainstream sources, and especially in public broadcasters. These particularly vulnerable organizations – like the BBC, PBS and ZDF in Germany – may traditionally occupy what they see as common ground, but they are losing support from political partisans on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

THE VIRUS IS interrupting that trend to some degree. By April, when the pandemic was well advanced internationally, trust in mainstream media coverage of COVID-19 specifically was recorded as relatively high in all countries, at a similar level to trust in national governments – and significantly higher than that for individual politicians. Again concerning the pandemic in particular, public trust in old-style media was more than twice the level registered for whatever COVID-19 information was being provided by social networks, video-platforms, or messaging services. In Director Nielsen’s words: “The coronavirus is reminding people of the value of traditional news sources”.

Above and beyond the current health crisis, the survey shows that worldwide a majority (60%) still prefers news that has no particular point of view. It is only a minority internationally (28%) who prefers news that shares or reinforces their own views.

Unsurprisingly, though, America evidently wants to assert (once again, we might think) its oft-vaunted exceptionalism. It is of course in the United States where partisan preferences have most perceptibly grown.

However … in Reuters’ assessment, that growth is not as great as we might have been led to think. It turns out that the proportion of Americans who say they prefer news that shares their own point of view has increased, yes — but only by 6 percentage points over the past seven years.

And even here, in a country where fierce partisanship might appear to be ruling the day, the Institute identifies what it calls (a little oddly or ironically, given the Nixonian overtones here) a ‘silent majority’. This undemonstrative but large slice of the public – a striking 60% – says that it still favors news that at least tries to be objective. Reuters’ qualitative surveying, alongside the quantitative statistics, portrays Americans wanting facts (“just the facts”, “objectively delivered”) that allow people themselves – in the words of one representative individual who was polled in depth – “to analyze what they have heard or read and come to their own conclusions without being unduly influenced”.

It also appears, from the bald and stark evidence of verified audience numbers, that the coronavirus crisis has heightened this desire for objectivity. Since COVID19, partisan websites and TV brands have shown stagnant or low growth in traffic compared with other sources.  Specifically, publications like The Daily Caller on the right, and Truthdig on the left, have recorded flat-lining or falling page-views; meanwhile the New York Times and Washington Post websites have both increased their traffic, by more than 50 percent over one month (April).

Maybe things are not quite so bad after all for the hard-working journalist who strives for unbiased coverage.

I encourage readers to examine the report in full, especially for the stats that support its analysis (often displayed in graphically clear terms) and for the textured quality of that analysis: at http://www.digitalnewsreport.org