When Donald Trump began his campaign for the American presidency a decade ago, he instantly made it his mission to undermine faith in the established news media – and he has succeeded.
Before he even entered the White House, Trump blacklisted a host of news outlets. When faced with challenging questions he claimed a female journalist was menstruating and cruelly mimicked a New York Times reporter with a disability. Ever since, he has decried professional journalism as “fake news” and become a serial litigant against news organisations, including the BBC.
And he has achieved what he wanted. In America today, just 25 per cent of people trust the news. Among Trump’s base on the right, part of which seems to exist in a parallel universe, that number drops to a pitiful 15 per cent, while 70 per cent of that constituency say they absolutely “don’t trust” the news.
The malaise has affected the UK too, where Trump’s anti-media pay book has been adopted by politicians, including Nigel Farage. Similar sentiments have been voiced by supporters of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. When Trump was making his first tilt at the White House in 2015, a majority of the British public (51 per cent) had trust in news. Today, the figure is 30 per cent and the downward trend appears to be accelerating fast, after a 5 per cent fall this year.
The Reuters Institute, which has been gathering this data as an annual snapshot of the news industry’s growing struggle to engage the public, reports that trust in news internationally is at its lowest level since it first published its Digital News Report in 2015.
We are quickly approaching a point where societies have to function without the essential mortar of a shared understanding based on consensual facts.
The younger generations who face this future have already acquired news consumption habits that will only exacerbate these patterns. The report finds that, among people in the UK aged between 18 and24, 32 per cent have never regularly watched television news, 57 per cent have never regularly listened to news on radio, and 78 per cent have never regularly read a newspaper.
Instead, young people around the world are increasingly turning to online influencers and even AI chatbots to get their news. The study found that, for the first time, social media platforms and video networks have overtaken news websites, apps and TV news as the preferred way of accessing news – and that is for all age groups under 55.
Yet social media platforms can mutate. Trump has been aided and abetted in his bid to discredit the news industry by his great frenemy, Elon Musk, now the world’s first trillionaire (on paper). When Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44bn (£33bn), it was an established engine and market place for news. It was embraced by journalists.
Since he rebranded it as X, the platform has been positioned as a conduit for angry views on culture wars, with the loudest voice belonging to Elon. Reuters Institute found that X dropped by seven percentage points as a source of news in America last year, while the political allegiance of its audience has been transformed from majority Democrat to mostly Republican. “News audiences for X have grown on the political right and fallen among those on the left,” it says.
Again, this weakening of news has been very deliberate. Musk, Trump’s erstwhile head of government efficiency, celebrated his capture of Twitter by promptly suspending the accounts of targeted journalists at outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. He denigrated the BBC and America’s NPR public broadcaster with “state-affiliated media” tags.
In 2026, Musk uses his X pedestal of 240 million followers to put his finger on the scales of the UK’s news and political agendas, cheerleading for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party and prophesying that the country is on the verge of civilisational collapse. The President, of course, makes headlines and moves markets every time he posts on his Truth Social platform, which he does often and especially late at night.
According to Jim Egan, lead author of the Reuters Institute study, Trump and Musk are regarded as “news influencers” by sections of the American public. “They are seen by many not just as politicians but as people who are in the news and shaping it in a way that is much more direct than we used to associate with political leaders and business figures.”
Trump and Musk are not the only cause of the news industry’s woes. The failure of many legacy media companies to adapt to digital publishing and access a potential online audience of millions, and the exodus of advertisers from news companies to tech platforms, are major factors in news media’s demise.
The Reuters report also makes clear that the public is angry over the way that news media have reported issues including immigration, climate change, the Middle East and indeed Trump’s White House. But the political assault on the credibility of mainstream media is helping to drive people online, where the public is even more sceptical of the information it consumes, leading to further loss of trust in news. Reuters Institute found that 27 per cent of people globally now get their news from online influencers, ranging from Piers Morgan to Dylan Page, aka “News Daddy”. The number using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to search for news has risen from 7 per cent to 10 per cent in the past year, though it remains at just 4 per cent in the UK, the lowest in the world.
Yet Trump and Musk will be happy with their war on facts. In America, no news brand commands the trust of more than 25 per cent of Republican voters, with one exception – Rupert Murdoch’s ultraconservative Fox News is believed by 60 per cent, a higher trust score than the BBC enjoys in the UK, according to the report.
While a determined minority of us are still willing to pay subscriptions for professionally produced journalism (around 10 per cent in the UK), the Trump era has coincided with vast numbers turning away from news altogether. Around the world, an average of 42 per cent of people avoid the news “often or sometimes”. In the UK, the figure is a staggering 50 per cent – up by four percentage points from last year. Please don’t join them – we need to keep hold of the truth. Because those that choose to abandon the news are contributing to the demise of democracy. They are agents in the success of Trump’s mission and they will enable the populist politicians who are following his playbook.
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