Conceptualisations and analyses of distrust and mistrust in news media: Reviewing research from a decade of distrust

This research survey indicates that studies on distrust towards news media have increased in recent years. One reason for this is the numerous reports suggesting that institutional trust – including trust in news media and journalism – has declined in many countries (Flew, 2021). Another, perhaps more important, reason for the heightened research interest is the increased visibility of accusations of untrustworthiness and an increase in attempts by political actors to undermine trust in journalism and news media (Carlson, 2018; Carlson et al., 2021). Although distrust in the media and political attacks on the media have been reccurent ever since the beginning of the mass media (Ladd, 2012), the right-wing populist wave of the last ten years or so (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) has certainly led to the perception that we have witnessed a decade of distrust.

Underlying the increased research interest in media distrust is furthermore the assumption that both trust and distrust in news media have consequences for the outcomes and legitimacy of democratic governance (Dahlgren, 2018). Journalism and news media are among the primary sources of information about and scrutiny of how politics functions in a country. Therefore, increased distrust in news media and journalism could lead to less informed citizens, greater disagreement on factual matters, and reduced opportunities for political accountability (Ettema, 2007; Rekker, 2021).

Traditionally, trust has been the conceptual lens through which media research has approached these issues (Jakobsson & Stiernstedt, 2023; Fawzi et al., 2021). Trust in the media has been defined as the willingness of an audience member to be vulnerable to news content, expecting that the news media will perform their functions satisfactorily (Hanitzsch et al., 2018: 5). Distrusting the media has sometimes been considered the opposite of trusting the media, that is, an unwillingness to rely on the news media for information, expecting that this will lead to becoming duped or misinformed. However, in recent years, distrust has come into focus as a research topic in its own right, partly based on the suspicion that distrust is not simply the opposite of trust, and that distrust also comes in different forms and varieties. From this follows that we cannot automatically expect the same factors that predict trust can be used to predict all of the various forms of distrust, nor that the consequences of distrust are the opposite of the consequences of trust. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of existing research on distrust to bring greater clarity to what we know about distrust towards news media and journalism and what we need to learn more about.

With this purpose in mind, we analyse previous research on distrust in the news media with the aim of answering the following research questions:

In this article, we mainly use the word distrust, but the review also covers research on mistrust. Since distrust is the concept that is most often used in the research literature (see the analysis below), this is also the concept that we use throughout the article. The exception is when explicitly discussing potential differences between distrust and mistrust, or other related conceptual issues. In this article, we are concerned with distrust towards the news media and journalism. When we refer to “the media” we mean the news media, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

The material analysed includes original research studies published between 2012 and 2024. This period captures significant media changes, political and social shifts related to distrust, the rise of right-wing populism, and discussions about a “crisis of trust”. Preliminary searches in research databases yielded numerous studies, necessitating a focus on top-tier journals in media studies, journalism, and cultural studies. This approach, while skewed towards American and Western European research, ensures a manageable and influential corpus.

The Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers (https://kanalregister.hkdir.no/en) was used to identify the strongest journals. Operated by the Norwegian National Board of Scholarly Publishing and the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, the register ranks journals as either 1 or 2. Level 2 journals are considered the most leading in the field; there are 18 such journals in media, communication, cultural studies, and journalism.

To survey these journals, we combined the following methods:

Keyword search: Keywords, abstracts, and titles of published studies were searched using the terms distrust and mistrust.

This resulted in a final corpus of 112 studies.

Not surprisingly, the discussion on distrust is concentrated to a smaller number of journals in the fields of journalism and media studies, in particular Information, Communication & Society (27) and Journalism (24). In a group of six other journals in the field – European Journal of Communication (12), Journalism Studies (15), New Media & Society (17), Political Communication (17), Digital Journalism (16), and Journal of Communication (13) – there has also been substantial discussion on the topic of distrust. In the other high-ranked journals in the field, there has been some studies on the topic, but not many, in the surveyed period. Most surprising might be the absence of the concept of distrust in the journal Media Psychology. Within the journals from cultural studies, the topic of distrust has not been researched in a way that makes the research relevant for this review article.

The studies selected were read and coded according to the following categories:

Article data (title, author, publication, date)

Within the total corpus of 112 articles, 95 clearly state the country or countries where the data was collected and the research conducted. The US dominates with 40 studies. Of the remaining studies, the majority comes from Northern and Western Europe, where Germany is the leading country with 8 studies. Outside Europe, Japan and South Korea are the main contributors. The dominance of US-based studies is influenced by significant events such as the 2016 elections and the rise of Trumpism, which have spurred research on distrust related to misinformation and disinformation. In the Nordic region, the traction of distrust studies (see Table 2) may be due to these countries being traditionally seen as “high-trust” (Kangas & Kvist, 2018) societies, where deviations from the norm attract attention. Andersen and colleagues (2023), for example, mentioned an increasing political polarisation concerning trust in Sweden, and Tuomola and Wahl-Joergensen (2023) discussed distrust in relation to the rise of right-wing populism in Finland. Elvestad and colleagues (2018), however, used the high-trust environment of Norway as contrast to countries with lower levels of trust.

In general, the geographical structure of the studies included in the corpus probably has less to do with varying research interests in different parts of the world and more to do with reflecting the political economies of media research and international publishing, with varying resources (economic, intellectual, linguistic, etc.) in different countries. Hence, it might just mirror which researchers – and from which countries – are most likely to get their work published in top-tier academic journals in English. The concentration of studies within the US and Northern and Western Europe (83%, or 80 of 96 studies) limits the scope of arguments and explanations for distrust. This overview of distrust is thus particular to these regions and may not fully apply to other countries and cultures.

The studies surveyed are not only placed in space but also in time. The surveyed period stretches from 2012 until 2024. Interestingly, the majority of the studies are published within the last five years. Of the 112 articles, 88 specify when the data were collected. Of these 88 articles, 33 were researched with data from 2018 or earlier, and 55 were researched between 2019 and 2023 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Date of data collection

Comments: N = 88. The figure shows the years when the data for the surveyed studies was gathered. Articles that do not mention when the data was gathered are not included.

There has been an increase over time in published studies on distrust in media and journalism. While 2020 stands out, this might partially reflect the tempo of scientific publishing. The number of published studies researched in 2021 or later is expected to increase, since research that was initiated in 2021 or later is likely to be published outside of the scope of this review.

The increasing number of published works on distrust is unsurprising, given the political and social developments during the studied time period. Concerns about misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, and propaganda have risen during the period, while media and journalism have been drawn into a “cultural war”, with established media institutions being attacked by populist movements and parties. This has led to questions about the delegitimatisation and undermining of the media and journalism (Ekström & Patrona, 2024). Concepts such as “epistemic crisis” (Dahlgren, 2018) and “post-truth society” (Harsin, 2015) have been developed to capture these contemporary developments. Against this background, there is a growing interest in media research on understanding and explaining distrust, its reasons, and its consequences.

Research on distrust in news media is dominated by quantitative methodologies. Surveys and (quasi-)experimental methods are, if taken together, the most common methods in the surveyed articles (51%). The most common approach overall is a cross-sectional survey in a single country using measurements of trust to analyse the antecedents or consequences of distrust through a correlational analysis. There are also studies of this kind that incorporate a comparative perspective by including multiple countries in the analysis (Elvestad et al., 2018; Hameleers et al., 2022; Humprecht, 2023; Martin & Hassan, 2020; Martin et al., 2018; Suiter & Fletcher, 2020; Thurman et al., 2019).

Qualitative methodologies are, however, not uncommon in research on distrust in the media (33% of the articles). The number of articles that use some kind of qualitative methodology and data – interviews, focus groups, text analysis – is approximately the same as the number of articles that use cross-sectional survey data (38 and 39 articles, respectively). Interviews are the most common qualitative approach, followed by focus groups and qualitative text analysis of content from social media or alternative media. Only one article employed a full-scale ethnography, but this article did not specifically focus on distrust in the media (De Leyn et al., 2022).

A previous review of the research literature on trust in news media found that most studies were based on quantitative surveys (Fawzi et al., 2021). Although this is also the case for research on distrust, the dominance of surveys is not total. This might be related to different reasons: first, that media trust is a topic that has been analysed to a much higher extent that distrust, meaning that research on distrust invites more explorative forms of data analysis and open-ended questions; second, as highlighted above, there is an awareness that distrust is a multi-dimensional concept and that there are different forms of distrust with varying consequences. Although the same could be said about trust, it does seem that the complexity of distrust as a theoretical concept has invited more qualitative studies.

Niklas Luhmann (2017) noted that using ordinary words like trust in social scientific theories presents various problems. The same applies to distrust or mistrust. This issue is not always recognised in the reviewed literature, where these concepts are often used without theoretical or conceptual discussion, instead focusing on how they can be measured. Only a small part of the reviewed literature discusses these concepts theoretically, and it is mainly these articles that we address in this section.

In the surveyed literature, distrust is the preferred concept to designate someone or something as not having faith in the news media. Mistrust is only used as the main concept in around 10 per cent of the articles (e.g., Hjorth & Adler-Nissen, 2019). When the two concepts are used together, they are, however, most often used synonymously (e.g., Das & Schroeder, 2021). Another concept that is sometimes used synonymously with distrust is scepticism (e.g., Elvestad et al., 2018). Other words such as cynicism, aversion, or hate are also sometimes used as proxy words or synonyms for distrust, but this is not as common. More often, when they are used together, authors use them to make distinctions. Most commonly, authors distinguish between distrust and scepticism. This is a point that we come back to below.

The different versions of distrust circulating in the literature – mistrust, scepticism, cynicism, and so on – are reflected in how the phenomenon is explained, and in the reviewed articles, we found numerous bids on what the most important driver of distrust might be. Broadly, these various explanations can be grouped in either non-media–centric or media-centric explanations. That is, either distrust is explained by factors other than the media themselves (society, “the system”, political elites, culture, etc.) or news media and journalism are to blame for distrust through the ways they report on issues, represent groups, are organised, and so on. This distinction between non-media–centric and media-centric explanations to some extent also maps onto the conceptual differences identified in the previous section. The non-media–centric explanations for distrust tends to identify the phenomenon itself as something distinct from merely a “lack of trust” or “low trust”, while the media-centric explanations for distrust are more prone to defining it as the absence of trust.

The explanations for distrust that focus on non-media–centric mechanisms as drivers of distrust generally describe it as being a consequence of the general political, economic, and social organisation. Distrust in the media, and in democracy, as such, argued Cammaerts (2015), is an effect of a neoliberal social order. Since this social order increases inequalities, it fosters social frustration and anger, which among other things takes form and shape as resentment and lack of trust in democratic institutions and the media. In a similar vein, Wenzel (2020), Jakobsson and Stiernstedt (2024), and Schwarzenegger (2020) have considered distrust in the media as connected to political and affective polarisation, leading to anger and resentment.

In such accounts, distrust is not mainly about the media themselves. Instead, it is, at least implicitly, understood as a symptom of social frustration, political ideology, or inequalities, rather than having any direct relationship to whether the audience trusts the factual content of journalism. van Zoonen (2012) took an even wider perspective and argued that increasing distrust is a symptom of late modernity. Late modernity is said to foster an identity-based epistemology, in which truth and mechanisms to establish truth are increasingly connected to identity and emotion within the individual. This, she argued, contributes to distrust in epistemic authorities, such as, for example, journalism (van Zoonen, 2012).

While Cammaerts’s (2015) and van Zoonen’s (2012) arguments are mainly theoretical and speculative, a group of studies have tried to empirically establish that the explanation for distrust has less to do with media performance, for example, transparency in reporting (Karlsson, 2020), and more to do with political standpoints and identity. Nelson and Lewis (2023) argued that distrust in the news media is often associated with self-perceptions and exaggerated beliefs in one’s own ability to separate truth from falsehood. Partisan political standpoints and the rise of populism have also been shown to correspond to distrust in the media (Flew, 2021). ⁽¹⁾ Furthermore, Bennet and Livingston (2018) argued that distrust is fuelled by attacks on the news media, primarily from the authoritarian right. This is also substantiated by Hameleers and Minihold’s (2022) automated content analysis of Facebook posts by politicians in Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany. Their study confirms that right-wing populist politicians often discredit mainstream media institutions, with the goal of creating an alternative reality that aligns with their worldview and political goals. Egelhofer and colleagues (2022) furthermore demonstrated in a survey experiment that such accusations by politicians reduce trust in the accused news media outlet and the positive evaluation of factual content, potentially leading to a situation where citizens lack the necessary facts to exercise their democratic rights and duties. In addition to political attacks on the news media, Hameleers and Yekta (2023) have shown how alternative news media also undermine the ways in which mainstream news media construct facts, by employing a superficial likeness in their reporting methods, but with the goal of undermining established forms of expertise and knowledge.

In general, it is also established that right-wing voters tend to have lower trust in media and journalism. One study suggests that distrust is connected to right-wing political sentiments through the emotional mechanisms of fear and anger, feelings which express themselves and are articulated as distrust towards media and journalism (Ihlebæk & Holter, 2021). That political affiliation and ideology might be a driver of distrust furthermore corresponds to the idea of a “hostile media effect”, in which strong political involvement has been shown to lead to hostile perceptions of the media – and hence distrust in news media. The concept of “hostile media effect” is invoked in six of the studies surveyed, in relation to the question of distrust (Cloudy et al., 2023; Matthes, 2013; Shin & Thorson, 2017; Suiter & Fletcher, 2020; Tsang, 2018; Yamamoto et al., 2022).

There are also studies that consider if it is a decline in democracy that has negative consequences for trust in news media. This argument is found in Coleman’s (2012) theoretical article on political efficacy as well as in Cammaerts’s (2015) discussion on neoliberalism and the news media. The political efficacy argument is also substantiated in a research article by Martin and colleagues (2018), which shows that distrust in the news media is negatively correlated with online political efficacy, that is, the perception that political participation online can lead to political change. The study doesn’t establish any firm evidence for causality but gives some substantiation to Coleman’s (2012: 40) argument that when “people speak of distrust, they might really be thinking about [political] inefficacy”.

Another strand in the literature focuses on media-centric explanations for distrust and puts the explanations within the media and the media industries themselves or in people’s expectations, experiences, and attitudes towards the media and journalism.

Fenton (2019) argued that the rise of distrust in the news media in the UK is nothing but the consequence of a failing news media system: It is the lack of journalistic autonomy and the close links between the political sphere, the media sphere, and the economic sphere that is to blame for the trust crisis. Fenton didn’t base her argument on original research but pointed to several studies that demonstrated problems with the news media in the UK. How media failures are linked to distrust in the news media is, however, an underresearched area where more work is needed. Koivunen and Vuorelma (2022) analysed how, based on a case study, establishing trust is a matter of authority competition between political institutions and the news media. Another example of research that goes some way in this direction is Yamamoto and colleagues (2016), who have tried to explain the fact that distrust in the news media is reported to be higher in pluralistic and democratic societies than in more autocratic countries. They concluded that the traditional media tend to have difficulty in giving justice to and narrating “structural pluralism” and “political heterogeneity”, which they suggested explains the fact that distrust in the media are higher in pluralistic and heterogeneous countries. Furthermore, Guðmundsson and Kristinsson (2019) and Parks (2020) considered the increased professionalisation of news media as a driver of distrust. For Parks (2020), it is the “epistemic regime” of objectivity and what he has called a “scientific paradigm” in news reporting that has evaded moral evaluation and personal voice from the news. The most concerning issue for Parks is that this risks depriving citizens of the ethical tools necessary to make humane political decisions. But he also speculated that the “scientific paradigm” in journalism is what drives audience distrust in media reporting. For Guðmundsson and Kristinsson (2019), the increased professionalisation has increased the distance between the political sphere and the journalistic sphere and hence opened for increased hostility and critique of the media from politicians. This mechanism is what they concluded explains the increasing popular distrust in the mainstream news.

Negative experiences of mainstream journalism (De Leyn et al., 2022), feelings of (mis)representation and (dis)connection (Peeters & Maeseele, 2024; Vanhaeght, 2018), evaluations of the kind of sources that the media rely on (Martí-Danés et al., 2023), as well as an impression of “media failure” (Markov & Min, 2023), might also explain distrust. Distrust can hence be considered a form of “pragmatic scepticism” (Kyriakidou et al., 2023), based on cognitive evaluations of the media. It has furthermore been shown that participation in so-called media literacy education and the media’s own attempts to correct false information and report on the existence of misinformation can lead to increasing distrust in the media generally (Hameleers, 2022; Juarez Miro & Anderson, 2024; van der Meer et al., 2023; Vraga & Tully, 2021).

A larger group of studies seek the explanations for media distrust within alternative media, in social media platforms, and in the “information disorder” and spread of “misinformation” that they give rise to. Studies, for example, indicate connections between use of alternative media, exposure to misinformation, and distrust in mainstream media (e.g., Frischlisch et al., 2023; Park et al., 2022; Wagnsson, 2023). Also, social networking sites and discussion forums in digital environments can in some instances also be drivers for distrust (Zimdars et al., 2023): The mechanism is that social media groups can form strong connections between people, and through these connections, specific understandings of the world might develop. This can in some circumstances lead to distrust in information that does not align with the understanding of the world as it has been formed in the discussion group (Pedersen & Burnett, 2022). The opposite relationship is, of course, not mutually exclusionary: that distrust drives individuals to seek out alternative news sources.

Another mechanism behind why social media use could be an explanation for distrust in media that has been suggested in the literature is the re-contextualisation of news and information in digital settings, where “uncivil comments” can affect users’ trust in media. Through an experimental research design, Masulo, Tenenboim, and Lu (2023) have shown that incivility cues news audience members to perceive an entire news outlet – not just an individual story – as lacking credibility. As Ross Arguedas and colleagues (2022) have shown in an interview study, this also aligns with how journalists themselves explain increasing distrust: that digital platforms are changing the idea of journalistic norms and re-contextualising news and content from traditional media in ways that increases the audience’s distrust.

As is obvious from the analysis of explanations for distrust in the literature, these explanations range from the macro-level of social structure to the meso- and micro-levels of media institutions and individual traits and attitudes. These levels are, in some instances, treated separately, and in other cases conflated in the analyses of why people distrust the media and journalism. The overview of explanations also underlines the variation in conceptualisations of distrust discussed above, ranging from defining distrust as the “absence of trust” to distrust as an independent phenomenon more connected to (political) identity or hostile media perceptions and part of wider culture or social conditions (neoliberalism, late modernity, etc). While these different understandings of distrust have effects on how the phenomena is explained, they also have an impact on how the consequences of distrust are understood in the literature.

Questions about the consequences of distrust have mainly focused on the relation to democracy, both directly and indirectly. Bennet and Livingston (2018), for example, argued that many democratic countries are currently plagued by a disinformation order and that at the heart of this disorder is an erosion of trust in political and news media institutions. There is, however, no discernible consensus on how we should understand the consequences of distrust for political life, citizenship, and democratic development. The prevailing view appears to be that there is a negative correlation between distrust in the media and democracy. However, this is often an assumption that forms part of the background of a research project – structuring it and determining which questions can be asked within its framework – rather than something that is the subject of thorough theoretical discussion or empirically demonstrated. Moreover, when the question of the relationship between democracy and distrust is empirically examined, the results often point in different directions. We believe this likely relates to the previously discussed conceptual diversity and the lack of clear definitions and operationalisations of distrust, which also leads to a lack of consensus on what can be considered evidence of a positive or negative relationship between distrust and democracy.

In the empirical studies, there are two main mechanisms through which distrust in journalism and media could have damaging effects on democracy. First, there is the question of news avoidance and less political engagement. The idea is that news consumption is an essential part of an informed democratic citizenship and beneficial for democratic development. A few studies suggest that distrust, or low levels of trust, in media leads individuals to eschew consumption. Hameleers, Brosius, and de Vreese (2022) have shown that news consumption decreases with lower levels of trust. Furthermore, they have also shown that perceptions of misinformation and disinformation – that the news media intentionally or unintentionally are spreading false information – leads to decreased use of television news and increased use of online partisan media. Vraga and Tully (2021) have shown that news media literacy increases scepticism of online news, which leads audience members to disengage from using social media to share news. The authors thus warned that news media literacy can have detrimental effects for democracy if it leads to an unwillingness to participate online, especially since people with lower levels of news media literacy are then more willing to engage in the spreading of information online.

While it seems reasonable that distrust in the media would lead to less news consumption and less engagement, not all studies have agreed on this. Goyanes and colleagues (2023) have looked at a broader range of factors for explaining news avoidance and found that the “news finds me” perception – the idea that one need not search for news actively to stay informed – is better at explaining news avoidance than distrusting the media. de León, Makhortykh, and Adam (2024) have similarly included a broader range of factors to explain why people turned away from mainstream news sources towards alternative, conspiratorial, and hyper-partisan sources during the Covid-19 pandemic, finding that low levels of political trust predict such behaviour, while low media trust does not. Andersen and colleagues (2023) have shown in a longitudinal study that alternative media use and distrust in mainstream news media are mutually reinforcing over time, and that use of alternative media supplements rather than replaces mainstream news media. Their study describes the typical alternative news user as a young person with low levels of media, social, and political trust, but with an overall high interest in news. This kind of person stands in contrast to Hameleers, Brosius, and de Vreese’s (2022) finding that low trust in the media leads to less engagement with news. Why these two studies point in different directions is, however, not easy to explain, considering that trust and distrust were operationalised quite similarly in the two studies. To complicate things further, Sang and colleagues (2020) found that people who remain neutral regarding trust in the media – that is, they neither trust nor distrust the media – consume less news in comparison with both people who express they trust and those who say they distrust the media.

Furthermore, some studies evidence that distrust in fact leads to an increase in different forms of political engagement and engagement with news. Ha and colleagues (2018) found that distrust in news media positively predicts engagement with local news, in the sense that (young, uneducated) people with low levels of trust in the media express that they are more willing to discuss and cooperate with other people to better the local community, and that they are more willing to contribute with different forms of content to local news media. Ardèvol-Abreu and colleagues (2018) similarly found that distrust in mainstream news is positively related to online political engagement. The theoretical and empirical arguments that link media distrust to news avoidance and to different forms of engagement are thus conflicted and point in different directions.

The second mechanism through which distrust in journalism and media could have damaging effects on democracy concerns individuals’ receptivity for disinformation and propaganda. The concern is that an increased circulation and susceptibility for false information has negative consequences for an informed citizenship and for society in general. From the reviewed studies, it is, however, unclear whether distrust in the media can be linked to such susceptibility. There are three studies in our sample that expose people to (authentic or inauthentic) examples of false information in order to analyse which factors increase the propensity to accept false information as true. In this way, Zimmerman and Kohring (2020) have shown that low trust towards mainstream news media increases the likelihood of individuals believing in false and misleading information. Using a similar method, and a similar operationalisation of trust/distrust, Hameleers and colleagues (2023) have found, however, that distrust only increases the susceptibility to false information spread by ordinary citizens on social media, but not false information spread by alternative media outlets. Humprecht and colleagues (2023), once again using similar methods and operationalisations, did not find any relationship between low trust in the media and resilience towards disinformation. It is not possible to explain these differences based on these studies alone, so more research is obviously needed.

There is, as is evident from the above, no consensus about the validity of the mechanisms linking distrust to threats towards democratic development. Furthermore, there are also those researchers who have argued that distrust in news media can be beneficial for democracy. Both Park and colleagues (2024) and Wagner and Boczkowski (2019) have argued, based on a qualitative studies, that distrust or mistrust among news media users in a fractured media landscape has beneficial democratic effects since it can lead audiences to engage more critically with news and information. Critical engagement with news and information is in turn believed to lead to better informed citizens and hence a more vital democracy.

The lack of consensus about the consequences of distrust is not surprising given the conceptual heterogeneity identified above. One possible explanation for the different understandings of consequences for democracy is that authors are discussing different things. It seems reasonable that what is measured as “distrust” can range from a “pragmatic scepticism” (Kyriakidou et al., 2023) to “cynicism” (Hameleers et al., 2022) and that these different versions of distrust have different consequences. Jianing Li (2023) has, in a survey experiment, shown the difference between “accuracy driven scepticism” and “identity driven scepticism”. Individuals who are driven by the quest for accuracy in their scepticism towards the media are less likely to believe in misinformation and more likely to consume mainstream media. On the contrary, identity-driven scepticism leads people to fall for misinformation, disregard platform interventions that flag a post as false, and avoid news. For a more developed and nuanced understanding of the consequences of distrust for democracy, we would need more studies following a similar research route and seeking to establish typologies and measures for different forms of distrust, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

This article has provided a comprehensive overview of the existing research on distrust towards news media and journalism, focusing on how media distrust has been studied and conceptualised, as well as its explanations and consequences. The increasing interest in distrust in the media is driven by significant political and social developments, including the rise of political disinformation, populism, and the perceived decline in institutional trust. Our review has shown that while there is a general assumption of a negative correlation between distrust in the media and democracy, this relationship is rather complex and multifaceted. While these results give us a fair overview of much existing research, we must be mindful of the fact that the overview only covers articles from a short time period and from top-tier journals in the field, which creates linguistic, geographic, and methodological biases.

One of the key findings of this review is the conceptual diversity surrounding the notion of distrust. The terms distrust, mistrust, scepticism, and cynicism are often used interchangeably, yet they carry distinct meanings and implications. This lack of clear definitions and operationalisations complicates the study of distrust in the media and its consequences. Methodologically, the field is dominated by quantitative approaches, particularly surveys and experiments, although qualitative methods such as interviews and focus groups also play a significant role. This methodological plurality reflects the complexity of the phenomenon and the need for diverse approaches to capture its nuances.

The studies reviewed indicate that distrust in the media is a widespread phenomenon, particularly in the US and Northern and Western Europe. The explanations for this distrust are varied, ranging from non-media–centric factors such as political polarisation and social inequalities to media-centric factors like journalistic practices and the rise of alternative media. The interplay between these factors suggests that distrust in the media is not merely a reflection of media performance but is deeply embedded in broader social and political contexts. The consequences of distrust in the media for democracy are a central concern in the literature. While some studies suggest that distrust leads to news avoidance and reduced political engagement, others indicate that it can foster critical media consumption and political engagement. This ambivalence highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between distrust in the media and democratic participation. The lack of consensus on this issue underscores the importance of further research for disentangling the different forms and effects of distrust.

Given the conceptual and empirical complexities identified in this review, future research should aim to develop clearer definitions and typologies of distrust. One of the main conclusions and takeaways from this review is that it is not enough to operationalise distrust negatively, using measurements of trust. Given that this common approach has here been shown to yield mixed and conflicting results, both when it comes to antecedents and consequences of distrust, our suggestion is to complement this approach, when possible, with other measurements of distrust. The question is, however, how this should be done, since the reviewed literature only provides clues but no definitive answers.

One form of distrust discussed in the reviewed literature, often referred to as cynicism, includes a wholesale rejection of institutional epistemic authorities. Not only that, however, it is also described as pervaded by a sense that nothing is what it appears to be, and that people’s intentions cannot be trusted. Furthermore, this form of distrust is often thought of as non-reflective and based upon feelings and group identities rather than reasoned discussion. Sometimes, it is also associated with particularly strong emotions such as hostility, and with a language that reflects those strong emotions.

Another form of distrust, often referred to as scepticism, is, on the other hand, described as a more careful and reflective form of distrust, which means that sceptical people are more selective when it comes to what to trust and not to trust. This distinction between two forms of distrust is, for example, reflected in Markov and Min’s (2023) article and seemingly confirmed by Li’s (2023) very promising study of different forms of scepticism. Nevertheless, there also seem to be some things that need to be worked out in more detail than what is being done with this rough dichotomy.

For example, is it necessary to be non-reflective to be a cynic? There seems to be people with a conspiratorial mindset who have very detailed understandings of the world, based on intensive and extensive mappings of how the world works, while still being totally dismissive of institutional epistemic authorities (Aupers, 2012). This indicates that only some cynics are non-reflective, while other cynics are more reflective than most people, when it comes to how politics and the media work. It is also unclear if a total rejection of institutional epistemic authorities necessarily must be accompanied by strong emotions like hostility or aggression. It is easy to see that they are sometimes related, but to what extent and under which circumstances? Another issue with this distinction between the reasoned sceptic and the one-eyed cynic is that the distinction sometimes seems to be a matter of both knowledge and attitudes. Kyriakidou and colleagues (2023: 2392) discussed what they have called pragmatic scepticism both as an attitude towards the media, but also as “rather sophisticated […] understandings of political news”, including an understanding of “the political economy of media institutions and the conditions under which journalism operates”. This indicates that the difference between the distrusting cynic and the distrusting sceptic might have to do with the one being more informed about how the media actually functions, but it also raises the question of whether knowledge is something that gives rise to sceptical distrust, or whether being knowledgeable is part of being a sceptic. This is another dimension that needs to be disentangled if we want to have a better understanding of the antecedents and consequences of different forms of distrust.

Comparative studies across different cultural and political contexts would help to generalise findings and provide an understanding of the global dimensions of distrust in the media beyond Europe and the US. Here, more studies that take the Nordic specificities into account would also be valuable. The Nordic political and media system, for example, is to at least some extent different from many other places, not least due to the high trust that Nordic citizens show not only for politics and public authorities and bureaucracy but also for the media and for fellow citizens. This would make the Nordic region an especially interesting case for studying distrust in media and journalism. The political and cultural environment in the Nordic region is also in many ways different from places were many of the studies of distrust have been conducted. As Egelhofer and colleagues (2022) have shown, elite critique of mainstream media is, for example, considered a driver for distrust, something that is still less frequent in the Nordic countries than in many other places. At the same time, the Nordics seem to suffer from an increasing polarisation in trust in the media and journalism, which needs more research to be fully understood. Longitudinal studies could provide insights into how distrust in the media evolves over time and its long-term effects on democratic processes. Additionally, although it is a very complex research task, it would be valuable to have studies that more directly try to address the relationship between news media performance and distrust in news media. The epistemic consequences of distrust in the media ultimately depends on the news media themselves and their trustworthiness. Whether an individual is right to trust or distrust is thus highly dependent on their media practices. As Schwarzenegger (2020: 374) has argued, “simple dichotomies of trust/distrust […] fail to acknowledge the complexity of how people compose and navigate their media repertoire”. Researchers of distrust in the media must think more carefully about these issues and develop new ways to deal with these complexities if the field is to be developed further in the future.