The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report — 48 markets, almost 100,000 people — finds global trust in news at its lowest since tracking began in 2015. In the UK, just 30% now trust the news, down from 51% a decade ago. The drift to social media, video and creators is accelerating. It is not reversing.
The Numbers, Straight
Trust in UK news has hit 30%. An all-time low — down more than 20 points in a decade. The Reuters Institute frames the slide as a story of anxiety, disengagement and cynicism. A less generous reading: people have been lied to often enough that they have stopped believing the packaging. They can see what is happening around them. The headlines do not match. Eventually you notice.
More than half the country now goes straight to social media and video rather than waiting for a broadsheet to tell them what to think. That is not a crisis of media literacy. It is a rational response to years of being managed.
The trust is not coming back. Not to outlets that treat their audience as a problem to be handled rather than a public to be informed.
The Reuters Institute attributes part of the fall to wider institutional distrust that reaches well beyond journalism. But the two are not cleanly separable. When coverage of immigration, inflation and the cost of living repeatedly fails to match what people experience, they stop engaging — and the figures bear that out. UK audiences rate immigration coverage at net −37, the worst score of any major story, and half the country now actively avoids the news.
The instinct is not anti-journalism. Asked what they want, 45% choose news that does not take sides — more than double those who want their own views reflected back. The public has not rejected the idea of impartial reporting. It has rejected the outlets that claim to embody it and do not.
GBTT publishes official data straight — no framing, no spin, no editorial judgement about what you are ready to hear. Right now we are heavy on economic data, because the numbers on debt, inflation and living costs underpin almost everything else that matters in British public life. But we are expanding — crime, health, education, housing. Wherever the gap between the official picture and the media narrative needs closing, we will be there.
We are building something different — something that matters to the public. If you or your organisation want to be part of it, you know where we are.
30% trust the news. We would rather earn it.
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