ST the most trusted news brand in S’pore, where trust in news is higher than global average: Report

SINGAPORE - Singaporeans’ trust in the news continues to be higher than the global average, while news avoidance behaviour remains low, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute.

It also found that mainstream media outlets remain the most trusted news brands in Singapore, with The Straits Times coming out on top.

The news organisation is trusted by 75 per cent of audiences here, followed by CNA with 74 per cent and Channel 5 News with 73 per cent, among the 15 brands included in the survey for Singapore.

The Digital News Report surveyed 100,000 people in 48 markets, including 2,014 people in Singapore, and found that 45 per cent here said they trust the news most of the time. This puts Singapore 15th worldwide, and third in the Asia-Pacific region, behind Thailand (55 per cent) and Hong Kong (52 per cent).

Trust in news here has stayed consistent in the last eight years, and is up slightly from the 42 per cent recorded in 2017.

The survey found that overall trust in the news around the world has kept at 40 per cent for a third year in a row, which is still lower than the 44 per cent recorded in 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, news avoidance, which typically grows as trust declines, is at the highest level in the 2025 report by the Oxford-based institute. Worldwide, some 40 per cent of respondents said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up slightly from 39 per cent in 2024 and 29 per cent in 2017.

The top reasons given by respondents around the world for avoiding news were negative effects on mood, feeling worn out by the amount of news and too much coverage of conflict and war.

The proportion of respondents in Singapore who said they sometimes or often avoid the news was 27 per cent, which was the fifth-lowest of the 48 countries and territories surveyed. 

Places with the lowest news avoidance were Japan (11 per cent) and Taiwan (21 per cent), while those with the highest news avoidance were Bulgaria (63 per cent), Turkey and Croatia (61 per cent).

The report noted that Singapore’s legacy news brands have largely retained or improved their brand trust scores, while alternative and independent outlets still rank lower, partly due to their limited track record and emphasis on viral news.

Audiences of all generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they do not use the brands as often as they once did, it added.

The report found that around the world, trusted news brands are the ones that people most frequently turn to when they want to check whether a piece of news or information is true or false, along with official sources.

The 2025 report included a question about what people do to gauge the veracity of a piece of information, and the biggest proportion of respondents (38 per cent) said they would first look to news outlets they trust, followed by official sources (35 per cent) and fact-checkers (25 per cent).

In Singapore, ST and CNA were tied for the highest offline reach, with 33 per cent of respondents reporting that they use both outlets weekly.

Other SPH Media titles that Singaporeans read offline weekly were Mandarin newspapers Lianhe Zaobao (8 per cent) and Shin Min Daily News (6 per cent), and vernacular titles Berita Harian (4 per cent) and Tamil Murasu (1 per cent).

CNA is the most-used online news source (47 per cent), followed by Mothership (46 per cent) and the ST website (41 per cent).

Singaporeans also consumed news online via SPH Media brands Stomp (15 per cent), Zaobao online (8 per cent), The Business Times online (7 per cent), and The New Paper online (6 per cent).

Online and social media remain the most common ways of accessing news in Singapore, while both TV and print have declined significantly over the last few years. 

WhatsApp (33 per cent) remains the top social media network people turn to for news in Singapore, though platforms such as YouTube (32 per cent), Instagram (24 per cent) and TikTok (18 per cent) have grown in popularity as news sources compared with the year before.

Data for the report was gathered by research firm YouGov through an online questionnaire, with sampling designed to be nationally representative by age, gender and region.

The Reuters Institute said that for countries with lower internet penetration, the results should be interpreted as representative of the online population rather than the national population.

The institute also cautioned that its use of a non-probability sampling approach meant it was not possible to compute a conventional margin of error, and that small differences are very unlikely to be statistically significant.