Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.

This week, we’re talking to Louise Jenkins, co-head of Edelman Data and Intelligence, EMEA, about the UK results of The Edelman Trust Barometer 2224.

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Here is a summary of what Louise and PRmoment founder Ben Smith discussed:

1.30 mins Louise talks us through the headline results of the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2024.

“The UK results are a heightened version of the global results this year.”

“We’ve seen big drops in the scores for the (UK) Government and media, which has plummeted the UK to the very bottom of the trust index.”

3 mins The trust scores of the UK institutions:

	Your employer	Business	NGOs	Media	Government
2023	76	50	47	37	37
2024	77	48	47	31	30

4 mins Why is trust in the UK’s institutions the lowest since 2018?

6 mins Louise discusses how low trust scores impact behaviour.

“NGOs are in the distrust scale.”

“The erosion of trust in NGOs has been a long-term trend.”

11 mins Louise discusses why trust in the media has dropped by 6 points.

“People are telling us that the UK Government is an ineffective agent of positive change, (suffers from) corruption, bias, does not have a vision of the future that they believe in and serves the interests of some, not everybody.

“The extent of how those attitudes have increased year on year is huge.”

“Is there are hypotheses that trust in democratic governments is always likely to decline over time.”

16 mins Louise discusses the trust scores of different types of media

	Search	Traditional media, incl. print, broadcast and online	Owned media	Social media
2023	52	51	29	23
2024	57	51	29	25

“For PR planners out there, it's kind of as you were.”

21 mins How does the UK’s trust score fair internationally? A selection of global country trust scores across the four institutions:

Country	2024 Trust Score
China	79
India	76
Netherlands	56
France	47
US	46
Germany	45
UK	39

“It’s shocking to me that the UK is at the absolute bottom of the 38 markets that we surveyed.”

25 mins What’s a good trust score for a country?

“For a country (like the UK), you’d want to be at the top end of a neutral trust score (so upper 50s)”

26 mins How do we explain an authoritarian state like China having such a high trust score?

27 mins Should we be worried that the world's largest democracy, India, has a trust score within 3 points of China?

28 mins Louise discusses the high trust scores that the UK public has in their employers.

31 mins Most consumer media face the tough economic reality that they are still chasing page impressions to satisfy an advertising-driven model. This means they often create populist stories, which is not a good model if you want to retain the trust of your readers/viewers.

Louise and Ben discuss the worrying results of this strategy from a trust perspective.

33 mins Have we seen AI impact the trust scores of the institutions of trust yet?