Factcheck: Global Survey by Edelman didn't say Indian media is the least trusted. They said the opposite

It is the sort of report that offers the opportunity for every ‘little guy’ to point at the ‘big guy’ and say: ‘Haha, you got no pants’.

In January, a number of such websites that give a lot of us the latest  happenings registered their shock/awe/disgust over a report that took a look at the global perception of people about media. The websites said the Indian media was perceived to be the second worst-trusted organsiation across the world. Considering the ‘fact’ that the World Economic Forum had supposedly said it, it was easier for the story to go ‘viral’ on the peg that media’s credibility is sinking across the world.

It turns out though that those who peddled this around did not do what media houses pay their employees to do. Check facts.

In an ‘expose’, the website Boom Live followed the so-called modus operandi of actually going back and finding the source of these allegations.

The ‘story’ came from a report originally published by news website Quartz in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF) which carried a table at the end of the copy.

(Twitter comment included in the screenshot to indicate mood within the country)

The table was A PART OF a global survey across 28 countries carried by the communications group Edelman on their website titled: ‘2017 Edelman Trust Barometer’, and traced by Boom Live. The survey was trying to measure the levels of trust that the public, across the world, have in their institutions i.e. the media, NGOs and businesses based on feedback from 1150 college-educated respondents from each country who seriously consume news.

What is interesting however is how Indian media actually comes out on top on perception.

 If those pointing fingers had even reached the twelfth slide of a 66-slide presentation, they would have found the table above. It says that though the trust in the media has declined across the world, the Indian media garners a 66% trust-vote, three percent higher than that in 2016. It is also the second-most-trusted after our counter-parts from Indonesia.

Same is the case with governments, NGOs and Businesses—while Indians’ trust on them has been rising, the trust quotient across the world has seen a fall...

And coming back to the first table that everyone raised a hoohaa about, it came after the WEF tweeted the story with the table. The ‘non-mainstream’ guys lost it when they ‘found out’ how bad we were on the inside.

Clarifying, the reporter who wrote the Quartz story told Boom Live that the table did not intend to compare institutions across countries. It simply listed the least-trusted institutions in all of them, and India’s name was listed alphabetically, (between Australia and Ireland) as one of the institutions within India that its public does not trust much.

That is about all.

The report was not intended to say everyone in the Indian media was doing their job wrong. It was, in fact, trying to show the ‘loss of trust’ the public has when stories fail to meet basic standards(read facts).

P.S. None of the ‘media’ actually picked up the ‘news’. See screenshot below: