After the Bell: We are in a terrible state – trust me, I’m a journalist

It’s weird how many dad jokes there are about trust. Don’t trust trees – they’re shady. Don’t trust atoms – they’ve been charged. Don’t trust artists – they are sketchy and they will frame you. Never trust a plastic surgeon – they don’t have skin in the game. Don’t trust graph paper – always plotting something. Don’t trust pigeons – always the risk of a coup.

And then there is my favourite: Your parents circa 1996: Don’t trust ANYONE on the Internet. Your parents circa 2023: Freedom Eagle dot Facebook says Hillary invented Aids. 

I mentioned briefly the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer on Tuesday, which actually demonstrates the truth behind the joke and bears deeper scrutiny. 

The survey – to remind you – is now in its 24th year and it canvasses 32,000 people in 28 countries. This is not an extensive survey by any means, so the results are consequently the feelings of just over a thousand people per country. 



But I still find it interesting because it’s better than having no data at all, even if a pinch of salt is required. 

There are three things the survey shows fairly definitively over a longer period. 

First, there is a shift from trusting “the authorities” to trusting peers. The shift first became visible way back in 2005 and it’s been getting worse ever since (or better, if you think your neighbour knows more than scientists do). 

The current edition released earlier this month focused on innovation and it asked people to fill in the blank: “I trust ____ to tell me the truth about new innovations and technologies. The options were CEOs, journalists, government leaders, NGOs, corporate technical experts, scientists, or “someone like me”. 



Guess who came last? That’s pretty easy – government leaders. Guess who came first? Scientists and “someone like me” came in together as the joint highest.

 Scientists have a 74-point trust rating out of 100, which is a feather in their cap. 

But “someone like me”? Really? People trust their friends, colleagues and next-door neighbours as much as they trust scientists? 

The second shift I think is really interesting is that business people have become the most trusted group if you compare them with government representatives, journalists and NGOs. 

In a sense, this is the least intuitive finding; business people are in the business of selling you things. How could that possibly result in a greater level of trust than people who work for nonprofits? If I were to guess, this is not so much because business is becoming more trusted; it’s because confidence in the other three is declining.

Because the focus was on innovation, the survey also asked: “I trust ____ with the introduction of innovations into society ensuring they are safe, understood by the public, beneficial and accessible. Business was not only the most trusted but the most trusted by a significant margin, scoring 59 out of 100 compared to the worst performer – the media. 

That last detail is the third longer-term shift; the decline in trust in the media. 

To me this is understandable. The media globally has been going through economic hell for over a decade as advertising budgets moved to the search engines, with publications closing and newsroom sizes declining almost everywhere in the world. 

“Traditional media” is still trusted far more than “social media” (62 to 44) but people trust search engines the most.

That trend has now plateaued, with only small variations over the past decade, although there was a big jump in search engine trust over the past year, presumably because AI’s Large Language Models are adding sophistication to the engines.



Interestingly, trust in the media tends to follow trust levels overall: the countries where citizens tend to trust their governments and their media most are largely developing countries, and ditto the other end of the scale.

The media is most distrusted in the developed world, notably the UK and Japan.

The last point to make about the media is that the biggest jumps in fear concern foreign attacks in the media designed to inflame differences.

The media really does need to look to its laurels, if it had them in the first place.

Sadly, people don’t trust my profession for the same reason they don’t trust stairs; they are always up to something. Ba-dum-dum. DM