Media trust research must consider multicultural audiences

share_windows This article appeared in the Australian Institute of Humanities'  Power of Humanities on June 12 2026. 

the Australian Academy of the Humanities' Power of Humanities.

Last month, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) updated its report on the extent to which Australians trust the news. Given growing political polarisation in the post-broadcast environment and a decentralised media ecology, it is not surprising that research on media and trust has also grown exponentially.

While the ACMA update again tells us that one-third of Australia’s population actively distrusts the news, it leaves unanswered several important questions. We remain none the wiser as to whether Australians place greater trust in international news than in domestic news, or whether people in multicultural communities distrust Australian news to a similar extent as the general population. Multilingual communities have ready access to international sources and alternative life perspectives which may make them potentially more or less trustful of Australian media.

Still less do we know what shapes levels of trust in news among Australian citizens and residents who have migrated from countries and regions that are regarded as Australia’s strategic threat (e.g. China, Russia and Iran), or whose religious affiliations and political causes have become focal points of growing polarisation in the public sphere (e.g. Palestine and Israel).

Although attention to media and trust has devoted considerable attention to technological change, a geographical lens is largely missing.

Trust in the news

Despite generally low levels of trust in news among the public, research elsewhere shows that public trust in media coverage of international news is often higher, as international stories may be seen as less closely tied to domestic politics. There is also evidence from the United States (USA) showing that American audiences tend to place more trust in their domestic media’s reporting on the PRC than in its reporting on other foreign countries and entities such as Germany and the European Union.

According to the most recent census, 2.2% of Australia’s population was born in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Meanwhile, the increasingly entrenched rivalry between the USA and China has had profound flow-on effects for Australia, as America’s staunch ally. Over the past decade, Australian media have largely abandoned the “China as opportunity” narrative, despite the fact that China remains Australia’s largest trading partner, and have instead pivoted towards a predominantly “China threat” framing.

This begs the question: how much do Chinese Australians, especially first-generation migrants from the PRC, trust the English-language media’s reporting on China and Chinese-Australian communities?

With this question in mind, I conducted a study that involved three roundtable discussions, a large online survey of more than 700 participants, and in-depth interviews with 20 individuals from the PRC migrant cohort.

One of the questions in the survey was:

“How much do you trust the English-language media to report on China accurately?”

More than half of respondents (approximately 51%) expressed reluctance to trust Australian English-language media to publish fair and balanced reports about the PRC. Almost 13% said they ‘completely distrust’ it (‘not at all’), while around 39% said that they ‘mostly do not trust’ it (‘not much’). A further 27% said they ‘trust a little’ (‘somewhat’).

The survey then asked:

“In your opinion, which of the following groups of people is best able to judge the accuracy of mainstream Australian English-language media reporting about the PRC?”

More than half of respondents (58%) said that Chinese Australians born in the PRC – people like themselves – were best placed to make this judgement.

Chinese Australians indicate distrust in news

Subsequent interviews may help explain this confidence. A taxi driver who has lived in Melbourne for more than three decades believed he was better informed about the PRC than most Australians without mainland Chinese heritage because:

“The majority of Australians… are not able or willing to compare the information they have been fed, let alone seek out different news channels. But this is not the case with us. Chinese Australians, more than half, I would say, are bilingual, and when they hear claims made about China in the media, they can make up their own minds based on the multiple sources of information available to them.”

The survey also included questions designed to gauge respondents’ perceptions of how much Australian media trust them. One question asked:

“To what extent do you think Australian English-language media trust Chinese-Australian communities?”

Worryingly, more than half of respondents (around 52%) believed that the media were either ‘relatively distrustful’ (around 42%) or ‘completely distrustful’ (around 9%) of their communities.

Participants were then asked whom they thought was the primary target audience for Australian media reporting on China. In response, around 83% said that English-language media reporting primarily targeted ‘English-speaking mainstream audiences’. These figures suggest that many people in this group do not see themselves as the primary audience for English-language media reporting on China.

In response to a related question—“Which audience group do you think is most likely to trust Australian media reporting about China?”—an overwhelming majority (around 89%) judged that the ‘mainstream English-speaking public’ was more likely to trust Australian English-language media reporting on the PRC.

Media & social cohesion

These findings helped me make sense of Chinese Australians’ concerns about Australian media reporting on China and Chinese Australians. Many feared that the broader public may trust this reporting more than it should. This concern is further reflected in responses to another question:

“How do you think Australian media reporting about Chinese influence affects public perceptions of Chinese-Australian communities?”

As many as 70% responded: “It has made [the Australian public] more unfriendly or suspicious towards Chinese-Australian communities.”

Interviewees emphasised that they did not necessarily object to ‘negative’ news about the PRC, and they generally trusted Australian media reporting on domestic issues. Indeed, they considered it more trustworthy than domestic reporting in China’s state media. What they appeared to object to was a particular news agenda that framed the PRC and Chinese Australians as little more than a threat. They also observed that too many news stories about China and Chinese-Australian communities were based more on speculation than on evidence.

If the principles of social cohesion include a sense of belonging, a sense of worth, social inclusion and justice, and levels of acceptance or rejection—criteria used by Scanlon’s Social Cohesion Survey—then my study suggests that social cohesion is not high on the agenda of Australia’s mainstream media.

There may also be a broader lesson here for media researchers. Research on trust needs to consider the differing capacities of migrant communities in multicultural and multilingual societies to trust mainstream media reporting when judging news related to their countries of origin. This is becoming increasingly important for two reasons. First, ideological differences between countries with different political systems are unlikely to disappear. Second, migration from one political and cultural system to another is likely to continue.