Twenty years ago, one of Britain’s brilliant academic thinkers – Onora O’Neill – delivered the Reith Lectures. These highly prestigious events are named after BBC founder John Reith and transmitted to a worldwide audience. In the lectures, Baroness O’Neill predicted key challenges the world faces right now, most notably our loss of trust in institutions. She focused on the decline of belief in leaders, governments, businesses, the media and ultimately in each other.
Fast forward two decades and analyses by private companies, media groups and in the past few days the Reuters Digital News Report 2026 show how far Baroness O’Neill’s fears have become part of our daily lives. Trust has been undermined not just by mischief-makers on social media or lying politicians, but by a widespread loss of trust in previously reliable sources of information.
One monitoring source, the Edelman Trust Barometer, is part of a business that has scrutinised institutions around the world for a quarter of a century. This year Edelman noted that “seven in 10 respondents report unwillingness or hesitance to trust someone with different values, approaches to social issues, backgrounds or information sources. This insularity is highest in developed markets, including Japan (90 per cent) and Germany (81 per cent). It is also higher than the global average in the UK (76 per cent) and Canada (73 per cent), and on par with the global average in the US (70 per cent).”
Edelman blamed four factors: lack of optimism about the future; economic anxiety; loss of trust in institutions; and what they called our “information crisis”. That involves losing trust not just in individual news stories but in news sources, including traditional media, social media and other online information channels. The report noted that two thirds of those polled across the world “worry that foreign actors are injecting falsehoods into national media to inflame domestic divisions”. Only 39 per cent of those polled “get news from ideologically different sources on at least a weekly basis”. That means roughly two thirds of us are worried about so-called fake news feeding us lies, while more than a third of us are in information silos, encountering only information that confirms our own prejudices and views.
In the past week the Reuters Digital News Report 2026 reported even more grim news about news itself. Reuters – one of the world’s most trusted news sources – concluded that news audiences worldwide are “reacting with growing unease to successive episodes of political, economic and technological turbulence … We see a range of responses: anxiety, disengagement and cynicism.” Reuters concluded that about 40 per cent of us practice “news avoidance,” dodging news that challenges our views or makes us anxious.
Baroness O’Neill’s 2002 prediction of a crisis of trust is, therefore, now upon us. This has profound implications for media organisations, governments, leaders and the rest of us as citizens. From the Iran conflict to Ukraine, from economic uncertainties to the normalisation of lying in public life, our sense of disorder and distrust in information sources is not surprising.
Reuters also reported that in the US “more than one third of all respondents under the age of 25 said they had never watched TV newscasts or used news websites regularly”. Perhaps Gen Z’s distrust of or dislike towards traditional media will change as this generation grows older, marries, has children and develops careers. On the other hand, perhaps the distrust will deepen and spread. What we can say for sure is that we live in distrustful times.
Politicians, media pundits, influencers and the rest of us no longer just disagree over what to do about problems. We sometimes profoundly disagree even about the facts themselves. Spend time on social media or watching fringe TV channels and we all come across parts of the media landscape predicted 300 years ago in Jonathan Swift’s great satire Gulliver’s Travels.
Swift wrote of a generation of liars "bred up from their youth to prove black is white and white is black, according as they are paid”. If you have ever shouted at someone on television, you will understand Swift’s prediction perfectly. And Baroness O’Neill warned about this two decades ago. She quoted a 2,000-year-old piece of wisdom from the ancient Chinese thinker Confucius who argued that three things are necessary for good government: weapons, food and trust. Confucius argued that if a ruler has to make a choice, he should give up weapons and food first because “without trust we cannot stand”. That’s very old wisdom and it’s being sorely tested in our distrustful times.
