Trust in the media: why the US is more polarised than the UK
John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times is the doyen of the info-graphic. He is a columnist and chief data reporter at the FT and a senior fellow at LSE data science. No one does a better job of creating striking visual images for data of all kinds. On 9 January Burn-Murdoch posted a graphic which illustrated the very different levels of trust in different news organisations by the Right and Left in Britain and America (see below).
(Copyright FT)
What is immediately striking is the different levels of trust in news media organisations in Britain and America according to YouGov. In the UK the gap in trust in particular newspapers, magazines and TV news organisations between Conservative and Labour voters is reassuringly small. In the cases of the BBC and Channel 4 News, it is perhaps surprisingly small.
The graphic shows that when asked how trustworthy do you rate the news reported by the following media organisations, most Labour and Conservative voters tend to vote the same way. The biggest negative votes were from Labour voters for The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Express, The Telegraph and GB News. The biggest negative votes from Conservative voters were for The Guardian, Private Eye, The Mirror and The New European. No surprises here.
More interesting, though again not surprising, were the news organisations who were trusted almost equally by Conservative and Labour voters: the FT, the BBC, Reuters, the Economist, Sky, Channel 5, Times Radio, LBC, the Metro and The Spectator.
And then there are the figures for those news organisations/outlets which are considered most and least trustworthy by both Left and Right. The least trusted include the Sun, the Star and the Mirror. The most trusted include the FT, the Economist and the traditional TV news organisations such as ITV and the BBC.
What is really striking though, is what happens if you compare these British figures with those of Democrat and Republican voters when asked which US news organisations they most trust. Suddenly the gap widens spectacularly, whichever news outlet they are asked about, whether TV news, magazines or newspapers. A few are trusted by Democrats and Republicans alike: Business Insider, the National Review and, astonishingly, the New York Post.
But, by and large, the gap is enormous when it comes to PBS, the BBC, AP, all the US TV news networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post, highbrow weekly magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic, and, less surprisingly, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN.
It would be interesting to see how these figures compare with twenty years ago, when TV news, in particular, was less polarised, or even a few years ago before the New York Times and the Washington Post moved to the Left.
An interesting litmus test is the coverage of Israel, the three college presidents (MIT, UPenn and Harvard) or race in America since the Floyd affair, though this isn’t specified in Burn-Murdoch’s infographic. In Britain, clearly Brexit has polarised opinion more than any other subject, hence the unpopularity of the New European among many Conservative voters.
What is also unclear is whether this polarisation will get worse in the future. The more Left-wing the BBC is seen by its critics, the more one might expect its trustworthiness among Conservative voters to fall. But BBC News (and Channel 4 News) executives will be delighted by these polls.
The last word should go to Burn-Murdoch who accompanied the graphic with a few tweets. The first said, “It always blows my mind how much wider the partisan trust gap is for US media compared to the UK. Most British media is trusted (or distrusted about equally by supporters of both major parties. That’s true of virtually no US media org. Deeply corrosive for US society.”
He also wrote, “Total number of UK news orgs with positive net trust among both Labour and Conservative supporters: 13. Total number of US news orgs with positive net trust among both Dems and Reps: 2 (Wall Street Journal and Forbes).”
This was followed by another tweet: “Then you have the additional problem that no single US news source is consumed by more than 25% of Americans, whereas 60% of Brits regularly watch/read/listen to the BBC, Far harder for partisan echo chambers to form in UK than US.”
In this election year in both Britain and America, these figures about trust in the media and polarisation could be among the most interesting to follow.
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