The latest YouGov poll on trust in major institutions gives the BBC cause for both optimism and pessimism. The good news for the corporation is that its news journalists are still more trusted than those of any other organisation. While 44 per cent of the public trust BBC journalists to “tell the truth”, just 18 per cent say the same of journalists on mid-market newspapers and 10 per cent the same of journalists on tabloid newspapers (those titles that have so gleefully attacked the BBC in the last week).
Against this, however, must be weighed the fact that trust in the BBC has declined significantly since 2003. Before the Hutton Report, trust in the corporation stood at 81 per cent. It has since fallen by 37 points and by 13 points in the last fortnight (although some of the latter fall may prove temporary). For the first time since YouGov began tracking public trust in British institutions, more people distrust BBC journalists (47 per cent) than trust them (44 per cent).
Yet as the table below shows, there is no institution that has not experienced a decline in trust over the last five years. The Conservatives have seen the smallest fall in trust since 2003 (from 21 per cent to 20 per cent), although they are down by 10 points since reaching a peak of 29 per cent in August 2010. Also notable is the large, if unsurprising, decline in trust in the Liberal Democrats. Trust in the party’s leading politicians has fallen by 20 points since the pre-coalition days of 2003. On this issue, the media and the politicians are all in it together.
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