Research institute · Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
UK News Trust 2025: 35% Trust News, 58% Worry About Misinformation
The 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report finds UK trust in news at 35%, down a percentage point year-on-year and more than 15 points below 2016 levels. Globally, 58% of audiences worry about distinguishing real from fake content online, and the report's net audience score on whether AI will make news more trustworthy is -18.
Source published Summarised
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Key findings at a glance
- 35% UK trust in news in 2025, down 1 percentage point year-on-year and more than 15 points lower than 2016 pre-Brexit levels.
- 40% Global average trust in news, stable for the third consecutive year. UK trust now sits 5 points below this benchmark.
- 58% Share of respondents worldwide who say they worry about what is real and fake online when it comes to news.
- 40% Share of audiences who say they sometimes or often avoid the news, the joint-highest figure ever recorded by the report.
- -18 Net audience score on whether AI will make news more trustworthy. Respondents believe the opposite by an 18-point margin.
- 10% Share of UK adults paying for online news, well below leading Northern European markets.
- 48% Share of UK adults using TV for news weekly, down from 79% twelve years ago. A 31-point drop.
- 12% Share of UK adults using print for news weekly, down from 59% twelve years ago. A 47-point drop.
- 17% Share of UK adults sharing news via social, messaging or email. Among the lowest figures in surveyed markets.
What the report covers
The 2025 Digital News Report, published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford on 17 June 2025, is the longest-running comparative study of news consumption and trust globally. The 2025 edition surveys audiences across 48 markets on six continents, including Serbia for the first time, with fieldwork run by YouGov between the middle of January and the end of February 2025 using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market.
The headline UK story this year is stability at a depressed level. Overall trust in news sits at 35%, down a single percentage point year-on-year but more than 15 points lower than the pre-Brexit 2016 reading. UK trust is now 5 points below the 40% global average, which itself has held flat for three consecutive years. The most trusted brands remain BBC, Channel 4, ITV and the Financial Times, with opinion-focused titles and tabloid papers sitting at the bottom of the trust ladder. Behind the headline number, audience appetite for source verification continues to harden: 58% of respondents worldwide say they worry about what is real and fake online when it comes to news, and 40% report sometimes or often avoiding the news altogether, the joint-highest figure the report has ever recorded.
What this means for UK marketers
For UK content marketers, publishers and brand communicators, the 2025 reading lands the same message regulators and academics have been signalling for several years. Source credibility has moved from a hygiene factor to a competitive lever, and the 58% real-or-fake worry figure is now the single largest qualitative concern in the dataset. The brands winning attention and conversion against that backdrop are the ones being transparent about how they know what they know, not the ones with the loudest creative.
Three practical implications. First, fact-checking and methodology disclosure are now commercial assets. If a statistic, study or claim appears in a blog post, a landing page or an ad creative, the source needs to be cited, dated and ideally linked to the primary methodology. Anonymous infographics, AI-generated stats with no primary citation and competitor agency 'research' all carry a credibility tax that shows up as worse on-page engagement and weaker conversion. This is the angle we work on every UK digital marketing programme where content has to earn attention rather than buy it.
Second, the AI-trustworthiness gap (a -18 net score on whether AI will make news more trustworthy) translates directly to brand content too. Audiences are not against AI assistance, but they are sceptical of AI-only content claims. Posts that explicitly disclose primary sources, attribute quotes and show a human editorial layer will materially outperform AI-only content on trust signals. The same theme runs through Pew Research's 10% influencer trust finding, where audience scepticism about creator-driven content sat at almost identical levels.
Third, the channel mix is hardening fast. UK TV news weekly reach has dropped from 79% to 48% in twelve years and print has fallen from 59% to 12%. Only 10% of UK adults pay for online news (well below leading European markets) and just 17% share news via social or messaging. For B2C brands, that is a fragmented audience that cannot be reached with a single channel, which makes search-led organic content (the channel users actively select) more valuable than push channels. For B2B brands, the data argues for owned-channel newsletters and high-credibility long-form content rather than dependency on social platforms whose news role is still shrinking. We work this exact angle on our UK SEO retainers for clients whose audiences are showing up via organic search precisely because they no longer trust the alternatives.
How they got the data
The 2025 Digital News Report surveys audiences in 48 markets across six continents. Fieldwork was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire fielded between the middle of January and the end of February 2025. Samples in every market were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region, and the data were then weighted to targets based on census or industry-accepted data.
Country-level samples are typically around 2,000 respondents per market, which is well above the threshold required for stable national point estimates but means smaller subgroup readings should be treated as directional. The report is published annually by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, with funding from the Thomson Reuters Foundation and other partners. The methodology has remained broadly consistent year-on-year, which is what makes longitudinal comparisons (such as the 15-point UK trust decline since 2016) defensible.
The principal caveat is that the survey is online-only, so it under-represents people with limited internet access. The Reuters Institute discloses this caveat explicitly. For the UK, internet penetration sits at 96%, which means online-only sampling produces only a small bias compared with the wider adult population.
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From Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism · published 17/06/2025