New Zealanders’ trust in the news has inched up for the first time in six years, according to an AUT survey – but the bigger picture paints a far more troubling reality, with a record 78% of people still actively avoiding the news to some degree.
The findings come from the seventh annual Trust in News survey, one of several indicators tracking public confidence in journalism.
The survey found just 37% of roughly 1000 respondents said they trusted “most of the news most of the time.” While that marks a rise from 32% in 2025, it remains a sharp fall from 53% in 2020, underscoring the long-term erosion of trust despite the modest rebound.
Co-author and AUT associate professor Merja Myllylahti said the increase had surprised her, attributing it to growing distance from the Covid-19 era and the overwhelming flood of low-quality, AI-generated content online.
“What we see from the comments coming from those who participated in the survey is that they see so much misinformation,” she said.
“The vast amount of AI slop and fake news – people don’t quite know what to trust, and then we kind of see that revival of people [thinking], ‘OK, journalists are doing their job’.”
Even so, New Zealand’s trust level of 37% remains below the international average of 40% reported in the latest Reuters Digital News Report.
Myllylahti said the fading of the pandemic period, when heated and often contested public health messaging drove public backlash against the media, had likely contributed to the shift. She also suggested politicians had “kind of calmed down” in their criticism of journalists.
“There were comments like, ‘at least the journalists are verifying the information [and] can be held accountable for their actions if they defame someone.’
“We got very specific comments which demonstrate that people are, you know, turning to the news as a source.”
However, she stressed the survey reflects perceptions rather than actual behaviour.
“We don’t exactly know what people are actually doing … We found that people actually consume news outlets they say they don’t trust,” she said of results from previous years.
“It’s really difficult for us to know based on this survey how strong that link between the consumption and the trust really is.”
Avoidance hits new highs despite the trust bump
Despite the slight improvement in trust, avoidance of the news has surged to unprecedented levels. A full 78% of New Zealanders now say they actively avoid the news in some form — the highest figure since the survey began.
More than half (53%) said news negatively affected their mood, while 34% cited sheer overload as the reason for tuning out.
At 78%, New Zealand’s avoidance rate is dramatically higher than the 39% international average reported by Reuters.
Trust in news found on social media also rose, from 13% to 17%, even as respondents voiced concern about misinformation. This may reflect the growing dominance of social media as a news source, now nearly on par with television in the survey.
Trust in the news people personally consume climbed to 50%, up from 45%.
The report also found a gradual shift in attitudes toward artificial intelligence in news production. The proportion of respondents comfortable with AI-generated news edged up from 8% to 11%, though around 60% remain uncomfortable with news produced mostly by AI. About 12% said they had used ChatGPT as a source of news.
Myllylahti said the survey had become far more influential than initially expected.
“There were a lot of people in the media who didn’t like that we did this survey [when we started it], and we were told, ‘Why are you investigating this? It is harming us’,” she said.
“Now they actually kind of, you know, are asking to be included in it.”