Last week, we posted a question asking people which media outlets they still trust.
In the responses, Private Eye ranked well, as did Channel 4. Our good friends PoliticsJOE won plaudits and, on the international front, Al Jazeera appeared to be the platform most people viewed as reliable.
But more often than not, publications with a strong political leaning came out well, with Novara Media, GB News, Byline Times, Morning Star and Double Down News frequently cited.
There was also a palpable sense of distrust in the mainstream media and, pertinently, the BBC, a feeling that appeared to be particularly visceral following the Post Office scandal, which raised questions over how such pronounced injustice could sail under the radar for so long.
Overall, there were two key themes which stood out above all else, which revolve around polarization and trust, or more to the point, a lack of it.
The Post Office scandal has brought to the fore a growing distrust in the mainstream media, which appears to be more pronounced in the UK than anywhere else.
According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, Britain saw the biggest drop in trust in the media and was the least trusted out of 28 countries surveyed overall.
Just 31 per cent of people said they trusted the media in a November survey – a drop of six percentage points since the 2023 Trust Barometer.
PR firm Edelman did not speculate about the reasons for the UK’s particular fall but in the past couple of years Tiktok has rapidly risen as a news source, Prince Harry has successfully exposed patterns of historical phone-hacking at Mirror Group Newspapers and won the right to take an unlawful information gathering claim against the Daily Mail’s publisher to trial, and the BBC (Huw Edwards), ITV (Phillip Schofield) and GB News (Dan Wootton) have all been hit with presenter scandals.
The figure is comparable to the 33 per cent who said they have faith in the media in the latest Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Such distrust in the media could well stem from the degree of polarization in society which can lead people to deem media brands as “impartial” if they support their worldview.
Doing the media rounds this morning, culture secretary Lucy Frazer put this on show, saying she believes the BBC has been biased “on occasion” as she discussed new measures aimed at boosting confidence in the corporation’s impartiality.
It comes as media regulator Ofcom is set to be handed more powers over the corporation’s online services, meaning it could gain enforcement action over BBC News website articles it does not believe meet relevant broadcast standards.
Asked why she thinks the BBC is biased, Frazer cited its reporting of a hospital attack in Gaza, which suggests she was upset at how the broadcaster didn’t fall into step with the government’s position on the conflict in the Middle East, and in doing so, displayed “bias”.
By addressing the impartiality question in the way she did, Frazer inadvertently demonstrated how difficult it is to be truly impartial in today’s media industry.
Ultimately, what most people mean by “impartiality” is “the worldview I agree with”, rather than putting both sides of the argument forward, having fair representation on both sides or making an allowance for nuance in reporting.
Perhaps, as Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart have been at pains to point out with The Rest is Politics, there should be more room for disagreeing agreeably in the media mix?
