Woke & Wiggling Around the Truth . . . NZers Turning Their Backs on 'Legacy Media' in Droves

New Zealanders' trust in mainstream media has fallen steadily over the past five years to hit an all-time low point, whereby now only one in three of us (that would not include yours truly, of course) has any degree of trust in the "news" these traditional outlets serve up.

The National Director and podcast host of Family First - an increasingly popular and now well-followed conservative Christian lobby group - dissects the key components of the New Zealand findings within a greater 46-country survey conducted annually.

Among its key findings are that:

• While 2020 findings in the annual 'Trust in News in (New Zealand)' survey (by the AUT Research Centre for Journalism, Media & Democracy in conjunction with the Reuters' Insititute for the Study of Journalism) showed that 53 percent of New Zealanders trusted the news "in general", by 2024 that figure sat at just 33 percent (and that wasn't a "complete trust", either. The "complete trust" figure sat at a miniscule 3 percent).

• Key reasons for distrust in mainstream media included that:  Reporting is biased; reporting is opinion more than fact; story angles are dictated by the political leanings of the newsroom staff; poor journalism (factual mistakes, dumbed down stories and clickbait headlines); spun or twisted stories to fit a political agenda: government funding erosion of neutrality in reporting. You see the clear theme coming through here.

• New Zealand has the highest rate of news avoidance in the world, viz a viz the above-listed reasons.

Something to be proud of, NOT.