#media-trust

#media-trust

Predicting the future of journalism with any precision may be a fool's errand, though the broad - and mostly bleak - contours are obvious enough: local news will still face collapse; public trust will continue to buckle under the twin pressures of social media brain rot and partisan echo chambers masquerading as "news." AI experimentation will carry on, though previous overinvestment will hopefully cool, and most of the genuinely useful applications will be internal tools.

In 2026, the biggest challenge for news consumers won't be finding information it will be figuring out what to trust and how to make sense of a deluge of competing narratives and facts. We at Pew Research Center have seen in our work that many Americans say they often encounter inaccurate news online and struggle to know what's true or not.

I have complete confidence that both Samir Shah, the chair of the BBC, and Tim Davie are treating this with the seriousness that this demands. I do want to see that response to the select committee, and I will, of course, consider it and have further conversations with them about the action that they're taking. There are a series of very serious allegations made, the most serious of which is that there is systemic bias in the way that difficult issues are reported at the BBC.

Gen Z may not be the AI-native generation, but it's certainly the AI-pioneering one. From studying to shopping, LLMs and other AI-powered tools have transformed how young people navigate the digital (and real) world, and the changes keep emerging. As the Digital 2026: Global Overview Report shows, Gen Z navigates the digital world like no other generation that came before it. Here are three big takeaways from this industry-leading report that every PR professional needs to have a competitive advantage in the AI age.

"The press today depends on multi-trillion-dollar businesses just to survive," Heckman said in a conversation with Mario Nawfal, Founder, IBC Group Official. "They have to play the game of centralized Silicon Valley. They're dependent on multi-trillion-dollar businesses. I don't blame them; they're trying to survive." Heckman explained that premium outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and The New York Times must align their distribution and ad operations with Big Tech to reach audiences.

I have AI friends and girlfriends, they are always there when you feel bored

In his seminal book " Amusing Ourselves to Death," the late Neil Postman rued a media landscape in which news was presented in ever shrinking nuggets of time. "While brevity does not always suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It's simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less than one minute's time," he wrote.

A recent poll from Reuters and the University of Oxford shows that social media has surpassed TV as a primary news source in the U.S., with 54% of respondents accessing news via these platforms, driven largely by younger age groups.

The increased trust among Republicans in mainstream news could signal a slow shift, revealing that not all factors affecting media perception are permanent.