What Left and Right Actually Trust

The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report found UK trust in news at just 30%, seven points below the global average and down five points on the year before. Half of UK adults now say they avoid the news sometimes or often, up four points year on year \u2014 people aren't just distrusting news, a meaningful share are actively tuning it out altogether.

There's a real paradox sitting underneath those numbers: 73% of UK respondents say they distrust news on social media, yet for the first time, more people now access news via social media and video platforms (54%) than go directly to a news organisation's own site or app (51%). People don't trust the channel they're increasingly relying on.

The most genuinely useful finding in this year's report, for a site built around exactly this question: people on both the left and the right in the UK report dissatisfaction with how migration specifically is covered \u2014 for different, sometimes opposite, reasons, but both feeling under-served by the same coverage. That's a real, direct validation of the idea that a single story can leave very different readers feeling misrepresented at once, rather than one side simply being wrong to feel that way.

The UK is named specifically, alongside the US, Germany and Spain, as one of the countries with the largest gap between how the political left and right view public service media \u2014 in the UK's case, the BBC. Overall, more people globally see public service journalism as having a positive social impact than a negative one, but that headline figure conceals sharply different views depending on where someone sits politically, which lines up closely with the ongoing debate NewsDeck already tracks on its Media Ownership and Media Blindspots pages.