Peru
Peru’s media market entered the 2026 election year under intense strain, marked by the deadliest year for journalism in decades, political instability, a major television ownership change, and an election-driven infusion of public campaign money, alongside the expanding role of non-traditional digital campaigning and generative AI.
Press freedom groups described 2025 as the deadliest year for journalism in Peru in at least three decades.1 Four journalists were killed, all of them outside Lima, confirming the dangerous working conditions outside of the capital. The National Association of Journalists of Peru (ANP) recorded an additional 454 attacks on journalists and media outlets, including threats and harassment. The rise in violence unfolded amid deep hostility towards the press from government officials and political figures. In one prominent example, presidential candidate Rafael López Aliaga publicly targeted investigative journalist Gustavo Gorriti,2 reinforcing concerns that hostile rhetoric from elites may legitimise violence against the press.
The current crisis also has a historical dimension. The Constitutional Tribunal annulled the landmark 2023 conviction of former army general Daniel Urresti for the 1988 murder of journalist Hugo Bustíos3 , leading to his release and raising concerns about human rights and free speech amid broader efforts to expand amnesties for abuses committed by members of the armed forces pre-2002. Meanwhile, former intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the 1991 letter-bomb killing of journalist Melissa Alfaro. These cases highlight a central tension in Peru’s media environment: justice remains possible, but fragile.
These developments have taken place against a backdrop of acute institutional instability. Since October 2025, Peru has seen yet another succession of political crises, reinforcing public perceptions of a deteriorating democratic order. President Dina Boluarte was impeached and succeeded by Congress President José Jerí, who after four months was himself ousted after failing to disclose meetings with Chinese businessmen. His successor, José Balcázar, is expected to stay in office until the new president takes office in July.
A major ownership shift has added to those concerns. In late 2025, the Schütz family sold Panamericana Televisión, one of Peru’s best-known broadcasters, to mining company Grupo Paltarumi and producer Susana Umbert, ending more than six decades of family ownership. The change has raised questions about editorial independence at a politically sensitive moment. Umbert said the new owners plan to move beyond traditional broadcasting towards a multi-platform, digital model.4 Grupo Paltarumi also acquired a 50% stake in the radio and digital channel PBO.
Campaign communication is also changing. While publicly funded electoral spending continues to channel significant resources into traditional and digital media, candidates are increasingly investing in programmatic advertising, social media, and less regulated forms of online promotion. As in other countries, some politicians are bypassing journalistic scrutiny by relying on influencers, streamers, and softer interview formats. The role of influencers is particularly relevant given that social media is the main source of news for 49% of people under 35, at a time when 6.7m voters aged 18 to 29 were expected to participate in the election.5 For example, Víctor Caballero ‘Curwen’, a prominent political news influencer, has drawn more than 3m streams on YouTube for his reaction videos across six presidential debates.
At the same time, Peru appears to be moving into a more AI-mediated information environment: 11% of Peruvians report weekly use of AI chatbots for news, up 5pp from last year. This growth suggests that AI tools are becoming part of everyday news discovery and sensemaking for a meaningful minority in a country where social media already plays an outsized role in news consumption. Innovation in newsrooms is slower but showing promise as projects such as Ojo Público’s Funes, an AI-driven tool to detect patterns of corruption on government contracts, and El Comercio’s AI-supported workflow used to analyse 36 candidate résumés and agendas illustrate.
Meanwhile, business pressures on legacy media continue to build, as advertising has been shifting steadily towards digital platforms. In 2025, Grupo El Comercio S.A. quintupled its losses and closed the year with a negative result of more than US$19m, while revenues fell 9.2% relative to 2024. These figures underline the structural weakness of traditional media even among the country’s most established brands.
Lourdes M. Cueva Chacón
San Diego State University
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
The gap between social media (up 5pp) and television as sources of news continues to grow for our online sample. Several newspapers and digital-native brands registered growth of 4-6pp in this election year.
Pay for online news
14%
(-4)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
38%
(-1)
Trust in news overall
32%
(-8)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news overall is down 8pp to its lowest level since 2021, at a time of deep political unrest and as the election campaign draws conflicting information onto digital platforms that are widely used for news. However, trust in individual news brands remains stable, and most are trusted by the majority of respondents.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
144/180
Score 37.86
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
