Ten years ago, a reader in Birmingham or Buenos Aires was twenty percentage points more likely to trust the evening news than they are today. That single fact, buried inside the Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, carries the weight of an era: a decade in which smartphones multiplied, social feeds accelerated, and the bond between journalism and its audience frayed in ways that may not be easily repaired. Published on Tuesday and drawn from an online survey of nearly 100,000 people across 48 markets — spanning Europe, Latin America, Asia and beyond — the report places global trust in news at 37%, a figure that represents the lowest point recorded since these annual measurements began in 2015. The geography of distrust is uneven but unsparing.

In the United Kingdom, trust has fallen five points in a single year to 30%, a number that sits a full twenty points below where it stood a decade ago. In the United States, it is lower still, at 25%, with politically right-leaning Americans registering a striking 15% — a figure that speaks less to indifference than to a deep, almost principled estrangement from mainstream outlets. CBS News and Fox News have each shed ten trust points since 2025 alone, while CNN has fallen by six, suggesting that neither liberal nor conservative editorial identities are offering much shelter from the storm. What is replacing the nightly bulletin is, at best, a patchwork.

More than half of respondents now reach for social media or online video platforms as their primary news route, and online news video is consumed weekly by 77% of people globally — a figure that now outpaces broadcast television in every surveyed market except Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.