When Donald Trump began his campaign for the American presidency a decade ago, he instantly made it his mission to undermine faith in the established news media – and he has succeeded.

Before he even entered the White House, Trump blacklisted a host of news outlets. When faced with challenging questions he claimed a female journalist was menstruating and cruelly mimicked a New York Times reporter with a disability. Ever since, he has decried professional journalism as “fake news” and become a serial litigant against news organisations, including the BBC.

And he has achieved what he wanted. In America today, just 25 per cent of people trust the news. Among Trump’s base on the right, part of which seems to exist in a parallel universe, that number drops to a pitiful 15 per cent, while 70 per cent of that constituency say they absolutely “don’t trust” the news.

The malaise has affected the UK too, where Trump’s anti-media pay book has been adopted by politicians, including Nigel Farage. Similar sentiments have been voiced by supporters of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. When Trump was making his first tilt at the White House in 2015, a majority of the British public (51 per cent) had trust in news. Today, the figure is 30 per cent and the downward trend appears to be accelerating fast, after a 5 per cent fall this year.

The Reuters Institute, which has been gathering this data as an annual snapshot of the news industry’s growing struggle to engage the public, reports that trust in news internationally is at its lowest level since it first published its Digital News Report in 2015.

We are........

© iNews