Mike's Minute: Plenty of questions around trust in the media

One of the key questions out of the annual Trust in News survey is, did Covid kill trust in New Zealand's media?  There are several notable numbers and trends and also a couple of problems.  What is trust, is another question. Your trust is not my trust and what you use to form trust is not covered in this.  For example, Newstalk ZB is a mix of news and commentary. Do you trust the news and not the commentary? Or both? Or the opposite? Does the fact Radio New Zealand fell mean you listened to Jim Mora once too often, or they don’t provide a straight bat in their bulletins anymore?  Does the fact Simon Dallow opens the 6pm news with what seems like an increasingly long Māori version of "good evening" affect your outlook on the bulletin that follows?  The upshot is that in the last handful of years our trust in news in this country has plummeted, and badly.  In 2020 it was 53%, now it is 33%.  Where did the trust go? And does the collapse in trust get sheeted back to Covid, the one o'clock lectures from the pulpit of truth and the Government's millions to newsrooms to help them through the period?  The biggest individual falls year on year are with TVNZ and Newshub?  Not far behind was Radio New Zealand. For what it's worth, as a punter, this feels like my story because my trust is way down. I can also argue, to a degree given I work in the trade, that I have a bit of insight and there is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that the media and wider New Zealand do not, and have not, connected particularly well for a number of years.  In my professional opinion gleaned over four decades and counting, it's largely because social media has given a smallish group licence to go nuts with conspiracies, it's because a lot of journalists are very young and very inexperienced with next to no institutional knowledge and as a result they parrot press releases as opposed to asking questions, and it's because they also tend to be left-leaners who were more than open to the Ardern leadership of the day, which they fell for hook, line and sinker.  And so, the rot began.  In other words, they have dug their own grave.  Here's the sad bit - these stats come at a time when bits of the media are on their knees. That, in part, explains why the TVNZ open letter petition at last glance got 12,100 signatures, which hardly a cavalcade of support for what those trying to save their jobs would argue is vital work that we will sorely miss when it's gone.  My question - will we? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.