The 2025 AUT Trust in Journalism Survey has just been released and one of its subjects, Radio New Zealand, has this to say

The first survey from the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy (CJMAD) in 2020 found 53 percent of 1000 adult New Zealanders trusted most of the news most of the time – roughly in line with the global average.

But it then went downhill fast, plunging 20 percent in five years.

Gee, I wondered what happened in 2020 that steepened that downhill slide. RNZ doesn’t venture to say, but if they wanted to investigate the reasons their own re-branding exercise would be a tell.

For the key bullet points are:

  • Only 32% of NZers trust most of the news most of the time, down by an incredible 21% since 2020.
  • Trust in news in NZ at 32% is equal to the US at 32% and below Uk 36%, Canada 39% and Australia 40%.

I’m surprised the figures are this high, but then old people come from an age when New Zealand was a high trust society and they’re the main consumers of TVNZ and company. RNZ’s report tries to finagle this with one of their bullet points being, “Mistrust high on the right – and among the old”, with “old” defined as 55-64 years of age.

That’s not the age group I observe switching on One News every night at 6pm!

I did laugh at the following:

For the first time this year we asked our respondents who they voted for at the 2023 general election. The right and the centre-right are more likely to mistrust the media.”

The first time! Really?. I’d have thought that the ideological/partisan split would have been recorded years ago. It’s another example of the bubble in which AUT and their beloved MSM live, where they glimpse little more than the political parties of the right. Also another “bubble” tell buried in the middle of it:

“But when conducting those focus groups a lot of that age group [55-64] really wanted more in-depth and international news. They say they go to the New York Times or Guardian or Al Jazeera or whatever,” she said.

Ahahahahahah. No other foreign news sources come to mind? Not even the boogeyman that is Fox News? How did they pick these focus group subjects?

But all this is quite typical of RNZ’s article in general and the AUT in responding to those raw facts, with the expected mix of defensiveness and blame-shifting…

“There’s a lot of things contributing to this. The Covid pandemic and all the sort of half-truths and lies that were told about the media … are receding. And I think maybe the media’s also done a really good job since trust became a really prevalent issue,” Treadwell said.

… plus delusion, confusion and self-promotion…

“We were really hoping we have seen the bottom of it. We didn’t expect this, 
…
“There are a lot of paradoxes that are emerging as our research deepens”…
…
RNZ was ranked the most-trusted of 17 national and local outlets by a small margin, with a mean score of 6.0 out of ten.

…. and a good dose of traditional NZ “she’ll be right, mate”:

And it could be worse – only 23 percent trust the news in Hungary and Greece, and the number of Argentinians interested in news has fallen by 32 percent since 2017.
…
In spite of increasing news weariness, a healthy 69 percent of New Zealanders surveyed by AUT this year were ‘interested’ or ‘extremely interested’ in news, though that was down by 3 percent on 2024. Only 8 percent had no interest in news at all.

Oh well, at least it’s a better analysis than that provided by this Media Expert:

MEDIAWATCH: Trust in media drops again as Western Democratic Institutions fail to address inequality of unbridled free market neoliberalism.

You’d have to argue that “unbridled free market neoliberalism” grew worse in 2020 and thereafter if you want to not beg the question of why trust in the MSM was higher before then when there was, according to the TDB clowns, vast amounts of “unbridled free market neoliberalism”.

But that would an require explanation of the phrase, while all the Far Left want is an epithet for their agit-prop.

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More examples of a complete lack of awareness, this time from America.

The subtext of the entire play was, “Be careful or the media will play you for fools.” And then the crowd got played for fools & cheered it. I’m not sure if it’s diabolical satire of cheering crowd or painful lack of self awareness & accidental destruction of the play’s message.