The Media Trust Gap and Its Political Explanations: How Individual and Sociopolitical Factors Differentiate News Trust Preferences in Asian Societies

Abstract

Despite the increasing reliance on online media for news consumption, people generally exhibit lower levels of trust in online news relative to traditional media. To explain the preference disparities in media trust and their potential cross-national variations, this article examines individuals’ trust gap between newspapers and Internet news across 14 countries and regions in East, South, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on nationally representative data and other country-level data (2018–2021), we test two underlying mechanisms, political trust transfer and alternative information orientation, that account for the media trust gap, as well as their boundary conditions. Multilevel analysis reveals that political trust positively correlates with people’s relative trust in newspapers, which is pronounced in societies with lower levels of polarization and limited press freedom. Besides, using the Internet and social media as the main channels of political information seeking may increase people’s relative trust in Internet news, especially in societies with higher levels of press freedom and political polarization. Our findings offer systematic explanations for news trust preferences by combining political characteristics and their contextual conditions, which have implications for understanding today’s media trust crisis.