As trust declines earned media becomes PR's most valuable asset
As trust in news, institutions and online information declines, PR professionals should look to credible journalism and earned media as essential tools for building reputation.
According to the 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, the UK public’s trust in news has dropped precipitously from around 50 per cent to 37 per cent. It’s even lower in the US – standing at 25 per cent. The report highlights that this drop is due to audiences migrating to social video platforms, independent creators and AI chatbots.
The information ecosystem has become ever more murky, noisy and challenging. Misinformation and disinformation rank second in the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks report, with bad actors empowered by new technologies which have made it so much easier to create false but eminently believable material to influence and to harm.
How trust is steadily disappearing rather than vanishing overnight
The fundamentals boil down to: reputation is all about trust. It’s about whether or not the people that matter to your organisation, or to you as a person, trust that you will do what you say, and that what you say is credible. It would be easy to look at the Reuters Institute report and conclude that if you want to build trust, the last place to try and do so is within the news economy.
Not only is trust in news diminishing, but so is interest in news. People are switching off and deliberately tuning out. This active decoupling from mainstream news networks highlights how more and more audiences would rather consume content from influencers, podcasts and sign up to newsletters to stay connected.
But let’s not be too hasty in the dismissal of news as a source of truth, and as a mechanism for building reputational capital. Legacy media brands, like the BBC and the FT, still command trust levels which are even higher than the overall UK average was back in 2016. Local media stacks up well too, and should always be part of the mix when building out PR plans, which reach close-proximity stakeholder groups.
Publishers blocking AI training bots to protect intellectual property
There have been lots of voices from PR land promoting the value of media relations in the age of AI. We often hear about how frequently AI platforms cite traditional media. It’s true, and it’s a very good reason why media relations remains a powerful tool in the reputation-building kit. Yes, earned media supports GEO, but it’s not the only reason for media relations and news engagement. Those legacy media titles have immense value in and of themselves – and they increasingly know it.
Many publishers are blocking crawlers through robots.txt (a plain text file that acts as a guide telling bots which specific pages, files or folders they are allowed to access and index, and which they should avoid). Time and Reuters are two of the most recent to impose access controls – and, at the same time, people are generally distrustful of AI as a source of news, and folks in the UK most of all, according to the Reuters Institute report.
Additionally, some reports claim that news outlets face a difficult trade-off when blocking AI agents; some data shows that major publishers who actively restrict AI bots suffer a notable decline in organic search traffic.
A shift from the post-truth era
Where do we go from here? Well, to counter the post-trust climate, a lot more institutions are implementing practical, transparent and community-driven initiatives to prove their value. Governments are making attempts to deliver highly visible local benefits, rather than making grand political announcements. And to ensure we promote trustworthiness and salvage trust in our audiences, the independent press, journalists, broadcasters and publishers are going to be our lifeline; and PR professionals, who are engaged to build and protect the trust in brands they serve, must ensure they’re aiding this public influence.
Tal Donahue is a Director at Infinite, an Accredited CIPR Practitioner and former PR Week 30 under 30.
Further reading
Understanding digital PR from a puzzled marketing student’s perspective
How to use segmentation, targeting and positioning for media relations