OPINION

As predicted the media are blaming everyone else for the massive drop in trust. Dita de Boni, who works for NBR, thinks it is a shadowy right-wing think tank destroying trust, and the NZ Herald is blaming AI and misinformation:

The media landscape has changed rapidly in the past few years, and so has the way people consume news. As Treadwell says in the survey results, “trust in news and news outlets keeps declining and journalists and media companies need urgently to form relationships with their audiences and with communities to rebuild that trust”. Additionally, education also plays a big part in efforts to increase media literacy among the general population. As a society, Aotearoa must come together to protect itself from the harm of disinformation.

NZ Herald

Talk about missing the point of the survey. I think we can all agree that New Zealand is coming together to protect itself from disinformation by not consuming opinions that masquerade as news.

But I’m baffled. The NZ Herald says AI and misinformation are to blame, but Dita de Boni says it’s the Atlas Network; which is it?

It seems only one legacy media person has grasped the impact of the latest trust survey. That person is Heather du Plessis-Allan:

Well, the news media has just been given a a massive wake up call.

A report has just landed from AUT showing how much trouble the media is in. These guys talked to more than a 1000 people to find out what they think of the media and they found trust in the media has fallen from 53 percent in 2020 to 33 percent this year.

That is big. Four years ago, half of us trusted the media. Today, only a third.

And this is not a blip, it’s fallen every single year from 2020. It’s gotten smaller in ’21, smaller in ’22, smaller in ’23 and then smaller in ’24.

And the main reason? Bias.

87 percent of respondents said the reporting in the news is biased and not balanced and many respondents shared the view that mainstream news was “clearly biased to the left”.

And that is not their imagination, because that backs what journalists say about themselves. There was a study a couple of year ago asking Kiwi journos which way they lean, and 81 percent said left-of-centre.

People aren’t dumb. They see it – and now we find out it’s the main reason why they don’t trust the media any more.

NewstalkZB

We see them. They’ve done this to themselves because of their bias and yet they are blaming us, the audience, instead of their management and their journalists. They are bent, we know it, and we won’t be gaslit anymore.

Now this isn’t a revelation to you and I, because we have discussed this for years now on this show – that the left leaning bias is problem for the media.

And we are seeing it play out right now, with this new Government being given absolutely no honeymoon whatsoever because their conservative, liberal and centre-right ideas are an anathema to left-leaning journalists, who rail against it every single day.

Now the real question is, can the media turn this around?

And I’m going to make a prediction – no.

Because this isn’t a revelation to you and I, but I genuinely think newsrooms up and down this country don’t believe this is true. That is my experience of talking to editors in various media. They don’t see it, or they do and they make excuses.

If if they wanted to change it, the bias is so deeply ingrained it’ll be very hard to undo.

So really, the benefit of this research is probably not for the legacy media, because they probably can’t change things. It’s for you and I – to tell us we’re not imagining it.

NewstalkZB

No, we aren’t imagining it. This survey has been going on since 2020 and each and every year the results are similar: we don’t trust them, we aren’t going to trust them, and it’s not us, it’s them that have the problem.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...