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June 16, 2020updated 30 Sep 2022 9:24am

Survey: Americans trust the BBC more than New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC or CBS

By William Turvill

BBC News is more trusted in the United States than the country’s largest national news brands, a survey published today suggests.

A survey of 2,055 Americans for the Reuters Digital News Report 2020 named the BBC as second only to “local television news” in terms of trust.

This meant it scored ahead of the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, ABC News and the New York Times.

United States media trust

Trust in US media scores

BBC News also came top of the UK trust ranking, while scoring highly in Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Singapore, Australia and Kenya.

Some 56% of survey participants in the US gave BBC News a trust rating of six to ten points out of ten, compared with 18% who rated it between zero and four.

Local television news in the US scored 60%, while the Wall Street Journal was in third place with 52%. Next were ranked CBS News (51%), ABC News (51%) and the New York Times (50%).

Buzzfeed News (33%), Yahoo News (36%) and HuffPost (40%) claimed the lowest trust scores. Fox News scored highest for “don’t trust” (zero to four out of ten) with 41%.

Trust in journalism: UK survey results

United Kingdom media trust rankings

In the UK, BBC News – which helps fund the report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – scored a 64 per cent trust rating.

ITV News (60%) and the Financial Times (58%) came in second and third.

The Sun came in bottom place with a trust score of 16% and a “don’t trust” score of 60%.

Read Press Gazette’s wider coverage of the study here and find the full report here.

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