Pollara Poll on trust in media is full of news nuggets

August 5, 2024

The Reuters Digital News report on journalism was released in June and MediaPolicy posted observations about both the global results and the Canadian outcomes.

Another month and another report, the July survey results from Pollara titled “trust in [Canadian] media” are available:

The new poll asks some good questions and gets some intriguing results. Here are a few that I found insightful:

• With nine out of fifteen million Canadian homes subscribing to cable with a CRTC-capped price on local stations, “legacy” television remains the dominant news provider. Together radio and television broadcasting are heavily favoured by boomers (born before 1965) but clearly not by Gen Z or millennials (born after 1980) who are committed in large numbers to getting their news from organic posts or through hyperlinks on social media platforms. That generation gap is Pollara’s headline observation. But the same data reveals a narrow generation gap in consuming text journalism offered online by newspapers and other media providers. That’s encouraging:

• In general, public opinion on “trust” in media often presents as a riddle: individual news consumers appear to equate “trust” of a news outlet with their own loyalty to a news outlet. This poll asked respondents for their top criteria of what they mean by “trust” and pollsters got this result when respondents were asked to pick up to three answer statements:

The respondents’ top ranking of accurate reporting (67%) and unbiased reporting (59%) is a “good” answer, as is the ultra low ranking of “express an opinion that matches mine.” (3% of respondents)

That public altruism is difficult to square with the same question in the Reuters survey which included the answer statements “represent people like me fairly” (65%) and “similar values to me” (56%).

The Pollara poll got similar results to Reuters by finding a gap between news consumers’ trust in their preferred news outlet, versus the ones they dislike or don’t follow (see slide 15).

For a little fun as the long weekend ebbs, try this little exercise: mark each of the top ten Canadian news sites on this slide as “conservative,” “centrist,” or “progressive”:

Again just for fun, you can check your answers against this slide on popularity of news outlets measured by “voter intention:”

To conclude, consider whether there is a correlation between your results and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s positions on news journalists, news outlets, and defunding the CBC.

And have a good week.

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