BBC News seems to have a serious fan club in Kenya. Of the Kenyans who rated it in a major international survey of news habits this year, 91% said they trust the British broadcaster’s news, and Nigerian respondents came in at 90%. Americans were a tougher crowd, giving the same brand 47%.
The same split shows up for the news in general. Every year the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford surveys people across dozens of countries for its Digital News Report. This year’s edition, out in June, covered 48 countries with around 2,000 people in each. Among its questions is one simple statement: “I think you can trust most news most of the time.” It’s the sort of thing you answer from the gut. Only a quarter of Americans agreed, and I can’t say I’m surprised.
In Finland, nearly two-thirds agreed, and in Kenya and Nigeria more than two-thirds did. That makes Americans less than half as likely as Finns, Kenyans or Nigerians to say they trust most of the news, though the Kenyans and Nigerians who took part are a much narrower slice of their countries.
America’s 25% is also a record low, the lowest since the Institute started asking in 2015, and five points down on last year.
How the survey measures trust
YouGov, the polling firm, ran the survey online from mid-January to the end of February, with targets for age, gender and region in every country. In the United States and a dozen other countries, it also balanced people by how they voted at the last election.
The Institute is careful with small changes. A move of a point or two could easily be noise, so it doesn’t treat those as real changes. America’s five-point fall is well clear of that line, and it wasn’t alone. Trust dropped in more than half the countries surveyed, pushing the global average to its lowest level since 2015.
The survey also asks about specific outlets. People score the brands they know from 0 to 10, and a 6 or higher counts as trust. That’s how a single outlet can land well above the 25% headline figure. In the report’s US chapter, Lucas Graves and Joy Jenkins note that Fox News and CBS News each dropped 10 points this year. Of the brands tested, the ones Americans trusted most were the closest to home, their local TV news and local paper, each trusted by more than half the people who rated them.
Who is answering in Kenya and Nigeria
Are Kenyans and Nigerians just more trusting people? The survey has no way of knowing, and the Reuters Institute is the first to admit it.
According to the Institute’s methodology notes, the survey in both countries was done mostly in English, and only people aged 18 to 50 took part. That gives you a younger, English-speaking crowd, which is a long way from a cross-section of either country. The Institute puts it plainly: “Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.”
The Kenya and Nigeria pages add that the people who answered tend to be better off, better educated and more likely to live in cities than most of their fellow citizens. The American group is a closer match, built to reflect US adults by age, gender, region, education and how they voted. Still, no country’s sample is picked at random, so none is a perfect mirror of its population.
These same respondents are the most worried about fake news anywhere in the survey. Plenty of them also get news through WhatsApp, about six in ten in Kenya and nearly seven in ten in Nigeria. Catherine Gicheru and George Nyabuga, who wrote the Kenya chapter, say audiences there tell outlets apart and save their trust for familiar names. Almost every Kenyan brand tested scores above 80%, and Nigerian brands sit in a similar range. Tolulope Adeyemo’s Nigeria chapter notes that the media there work under political pressure and financial strain.
Kenya’s score has also jumped 18 points since 2020.
Finland is slipping as well
Yle, Finland’s public broadcaster, has spent the past year eliminating 309 positions, about a tenth of its workforce, under spending cuts imposed in 2024.
The report doesn’t connect those cuts to audience attitudes, but Finnish trust in news did fall four points this year to 63%, after holding at 69% from 2022 to 2024. Ville Manninen and Mikko Villi of the University of Jyväskylä, who penned the Finland chapter, describe it as “a return to a global, downward trend” after a boost that ran from 2021 to 2024. They also stress that Finns remain among the most trusting audiences the report measures.
I lined up the yearly figures from the report’s chart data for the US and Finland. Since 2024, Finland has dropped six points and the United States seven, so the gap between them has moved from 37 points to 38. That’s a one-point change, too small to interpret as a meaningful widening. The gap was actually wider in 2022, at 43 points, when American trust sat at 26%.
On these figures, the two countries have seen similar declines since 2024.
The distance to Kenya and Nigeria has grown much faster, from around 30 points in 2024 to 43 this year, though that comparison carries every caveat above.
Add the UK and the Philippines, and the US still comes last of the six in each of the last five editions. The Philippines had the sharpest fall in this year’s survey, down 10 points.
What changed in America this year
“Threats to press freedom in the United States have sharpened in 2026,” say Graves and Jenkins at the top of the US chapter. They describe President Donald Trump threatening to prosecute reporters for treason and taking legal aim at the BBC and The New York Times. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that a third of the newsroom would go, and Congress approved the loss of around $500m a year in federal funding for public media.
“We can probably expect trust in news overall to fall further in future,” writes Jim Egan, the report’s lead author. He links the slide to falling trust in institutions, politicians attacking journalism and a drift towards social media and video, which people have long trusted less than traditional outlets.
The survey can’t say which of these events moved the American number, and it doesn’t claim to. Its fieldwork wrapped up in February, so anything later, including the treason threats, can’t have played a part. Even for earlier events, a single agree-or-disagree statement is a crude tool for pinning a national mood on any one headline.
My mom and stepdad live in Arizona and, like a lot of Americans I know, they’ve grown disillusioned with the mainstream media. As they see it, the big networks answer to corporate interests before anything else, so they now get much of their news from independent sources on Facebook. Fox News is the one big network that still makes the cut. Like many Americans, they lean on Facebook too. It’s the most-used social network for news in the American survey, with 36% of respondents using it that way each week.
They’re also Trump supporters (at least they were, the last time I checked), and I suspect years of hearing him call so much of the press “fake news” have done some of the persuading. In a 2019 white paper, Michael Cornfield of George Washington University counted 291 tweets in which Trump used “Fake News” or “Fake News Media” during his first 19 months in office, about 7% of everything he posted on his main account. Fox News was the exception, the same one my parents make. It may not be a coincidence.
Experiments back that up, to a point. Emily Van Duyn and Jessica Collier at the University of Texas at Austin found in 2019 that people shown tweets about fake news from high-profile figures reported lower trust in the media and got worse at recognising real news. Their follow-up found the phrase “fake news” hurt perceptions of news and journalists more than “misinformation” did, particularly when coming from a politician. Experiments like these capture short-term reactions, so they say little about what long-term repetition does.
I also suspect social media is pulling Americans apart and dragging their faith in institutions down with it. The research is messier than that, though. In a large field experiment published in Nature, a team including Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan cut content from like-minded sources in 23,377 Facebook users’ feeds by about a third during the 2020 election. Over the following three months, they found no measurable effect on polarisation. They added the caveat that their experiment can’t fully capture what earlier Facebook use may already have done, so ultimately, the question stays open.
Other polls give different numbers
I wanted to see whether others agree with the Reuters Institute that only a quarter of Americans trust most news. Two long-running American pollsters, Gallup and Pew Research Center, both put the figure higher.
Gallup’s latest poll, written up by Lydia Saad, rang Americans this September and asked how much they trust newspapers, TV and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” A third said a great deal or a fair amount, up from a record low of 28% last year. Almost all of that rise came from Republicans, whose trust climbed from 8% to 22%, while Democrats held roughly steady at 50%, the lowest Gallup has recorded for them. The calls ended just before the White House barred several national outlets, so that episode isn’t reflected. I do wonder whether my mother and stepdad are part of that Republican bounce.
Pew Research Center‘s version of the question, from September 2025, asked whether people had at least some trust in information from news organisations. Kirsten Eddy and Elisa Shearer found 56% did for national outlets and 70% for local ones, both down about ten points in six months.
So, depending on who’s asking, roughly a quarter, a third or more than half of Americans trust the news. I find that spread oddly comforting, because so much depends on how you ask. The polls differ in wording, the kind of trust they ask about, who they sample, how they reach people and when they ran. Without a proper side-by-side test, nobody can say which difference matters most. Wording is the easiest to spot: saying you trust most news most of the time is a big commitment, and admitting to some trust is a much smaller one. The long-run direction is clearer, though. In the 1970s Gallup found around 70% of Americans trusted the media, and the Reuters figure has slipped from 32% in 2015.
What I can’t tell you is whether Kenyans and Nigerians as a whole trust the news more than Americans, whether the gap with Finland is growing, or which events did the damage. These surveys just don’t stretch that far.
The local TV score is the one that sticks with me.
Some 56% of Americans who rated their local TV news said they trust it, more than for any national brand tested. Maybe it’s simply easier to trust the people covering your own streets, like the weather presenter whose forecast you can check by looking out the window. If trust really does erode the further a newsroom sits from home, I’d like to know what local stations are getting right, and whether any of them have made it into my parents’ Facebook feeds.
