A report released today suggests Canadians continue to trust traditional sources of media.

A public opinion poll found nine in 10 Canadians found mainstream media trustworthy and reliable. It also suggests only one in four found social media similarly credible.

The survey was conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion for the Canadian Media Research Consortium, an academic organization examining journalism issues.
 
It found that about one in three young Canadians valued social media for trust and reliability and that overall Canadians were far more comfortable with professionally edited content than wiki-type refinement. Most also believed that professional media were better equipped to deal with critical issues than were citizen-based entities.

"The established news brands continue to be the gold standard for verification," the survey concluded. While younger Canadians were more optimistic about the possibilities for citizen-based media, even they registered a high degree of support for traditional sources.
 
 

We in Canada look with some detached bemusement at the media gorging on the U.S. presidential campaign in the primary stage and can only wonder what it will be like come the fall.
But a newly released Harris Interactive poll has some interesting results on the trust relationship among Americans with various media in this pre-election phase.
American trust of media hasn't been high in a long time. Canadian trust is higher, which should either make us prouder of our media performance or cognizant of the fact we don't have the range (that is, low end) of the tabloid press that often drags down the overall numbers in the U.S.
But the Harris poll has some difficult numbers for television. It seems Americans trust online news more than television news at this stage.
Now, it's not where they're going to get their political news  --- at least, not yet. They're going to local TV, then to cable news, then to local newspapers.
But, for a medium that often scores poorly in terms of trust, it's interesting that Harris found online trust strengthening at this critical time. And it's not online news from the conventional sources, either --- a fairly small core of the online trust was surfing the national newspapers and television outlets on the Web. No, it seems a new brigade of online sources is emerging.

 

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