Do Canadians trust online media more than other sources?

Cross-posted from Matthew’s Long-Form Blog.

This is an interesting contrast with Edelman’s own research, which lumps Canadian trust in media (at below 50%) with the “Distrusters”, a group that includes Italy and Russia. Search engines, meanwhile, dominate how we find news.

I’m not convinced there’s a contradiction here, because wired Canadians can use search engines as the gate into content from trusted media outlets (i.e. we recognize that search engines are good at finding, and journalists are good at journalism).

What do you think?

Key excerpts below the fold.

From the article:

The latest report from the Canadian Media Research Consortium states that about 90 per cent of wired Canadians consider the information they get from newspapers, television, radio and online news sites to be reliable. The percentages were a few points lower among those aged 18 to 34.

Only 26 per cent believed information from social networks is reliable – although the trust rating jumped to 40 per cent among daily social media users – and 65 per cent said they thought news from family and friends was reliable.

When asked how much they trusted information from governments or major corporations, only 42 per cent and 38 per cent respectively found them very trustworthy or trustworthy.

And from the Edelman Trust Barometer:

While trust in media as an institution inched up globally, it remained steady in Canada and declined significantly in the U.S. and the U.K. (figure 8).

[…]

In Canada, search engines rank No. 1 as the place people go first for information about a company, followed by online news sources, and print (figure 10). Their second stop is both on the screen as well to traditional print media, with 23 per cent saying they go to both newspapers or magazines and online news sources, which do include the Web versions of traditional media like newspapers and television. Thirty three per cent of informed publics in Canada say they trust magazines or business magazines a great deal, followed by 27 per cent who say the same for newspapers.

The data portray a savvy consumer who turns first to search engines to see what is available on the topic of interest, and who then seeks out traditional media to confirm or expand on what he or she has learned. Information ubiquity has changed the playbook for corporate communications, the data suggest, signaling to companies that they cannot simply be present with their messages, but rather must be omnipresent through an approach that encompasses mainstream, new, social, and owned media.