At 33 per cent, trust in New Zealand news sits alongside similar numbers for the UK (also 33 per cent) and the United States (32 per cent), but substantially below the international average of 40 per cent as measured by a Reuters survey of 46 markets.
Much can be said about the issues of trust in media, disinformation campaigns and the rise of fake news and their catastrophic effects to any healthy democracy but the bottom line is this: we need solutions, and we need them urgently.
One person who is trying to address the issue at its root is Bryce Corbett, a Queensland-based media executive and founder of Squiz Kids, a popular news podcast aimed at children. Corbett, a former journalist, also runs a school-based initiative that he says has taught thousands of Australian children how to think critically when they consume online media - and now he is bringing his programme into New Zealand primary schools.
As Corbett told Herald journalist Alex Spence, fake news is a clear threat to democracy. “You only have to look at the way that misinformation and disinformation flourish at times of elections,” he said. “The way that information can be manipulated and the ease with which it can spread on social media. We have seen that it can have the effect of completely destabilising democracy, and I really, honestly believe that unless we start to teach media literacy as a vital life skill, unless it starts to assume the same importance as reading and writing and arithmetic, then we will be sleepwalking into a kind of anti-democratic dystopia.”
With big world events like the US election just months away, we’re likely to see a flood of disinformation hitting social media and further eroding people’s trust in news media. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which, sure, can be used for good things, could also become a powerful weapon in spreading disinformation. All of this is coming at us fast and it is urgent that everyone has the media literacy skills required to tell the difference between real and fake news. For those of us who are no longer in a primary school classroom and can’t benefit from Corbett’s programme, something else needs to be done.
The media landscape has changed rapidly in the past few years, and so has the way people consume news. As Treadwell says in the survey results, “trust in news and news outlets keeps declining and journalists and media companies need urgently to form relationships with their audiences and with communities to rebuild that trust”. Additionally, education also plays a big part in efforts to increase media literacy among the general population. As a society, Aotearoa must come together to protect itself from the harm of disinformation.
