Our podcast: Digital News Report 2026. Episode 6: Does the public want impartial news?

In this episode of Future of Journalism, we focus on what people think of the idea of impartial news. We’ll discuss what impartiality means when it comes to news, whether people prefer news that takes particular lines, how these attitudes vary across countries, particularly when it comes to levels of social media use and political polarisation, and more.

The podcast

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Speakers

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is a Professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Copenhagen and a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He is a co-author of the Digital News Report 2026.

Host Mitali Mukherjee is the Director of the Reuters Institute and is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism.

The transcript

What impartial news means | Public preference and demographic patterns | Personal views and country differences | Creators, partisanship and publisher takeaways

Mitali: Welcome to the Future of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. I'm Mitali Mukherjee, director of the Institute. This is a special series of our podcast dedicated to the Digital News Report 2026 over seven episodes. What we're attempting to do is dive into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption worldwide. It's also the 15th edition of the report, and it's based on almost 100,000 interviews with news consumers from all six continents and 48 markets. So, nearly 50. In this episode of the series, we're joined by co-author of the report and senior research associate Rasmus Nielsen. Rasmus has written a chapter in the report that focuses on what people think about the idea of impartial news. So we're going to talk about what that term means when it comes to news, whether people prefer news that takes particular lines and whether or not there's any variation, both in terms of age groups, but more importantly, across countries as well. Rasmus, welcome to the podcast.

Rasmus: Thanks for having me.

What impartial news means ↑

Mitali: Definitions first as always, Rasmus, what do we mean when we use the term impartial news?

Rasmus: I think here it's important to stress, as we always do, that the digital news report is about the public's conception of news and journalism, how they use it, how they think of it, how they judge it. In this context, really we're interested in people's perception of and preferences for either news sources that seek to not adopt a particular point of view or news sources that take an explicit point of view on current affairs. The background is a rich and deep and complicated discussion in professional journalism, in scholarly work around the ethics and philosophy and values of news and media, where I think this is the simplest way to think about it, again, is the idea that there are some news outlets that aspire to what is often called impartiality.

The term is, I think, particularly important in the UK, where it's part of the regulatory environment and it's part of the mission statement of the BBC. But sometimes it's also expressed in other ways through, for example, the Reuters news agency's commitment to the Trust Principles of independence, integrity, and freedom from bias. These organisations that are very explicit about the desire to not take sides, on major issues of the day, no matter how divisive, no matter how controversial, no matter how clear some of us individually might think the issue at hand is morally, politically or otherwise, versus other outlets that are very explicit and clear that they do take a side.

A prominent example of this is The Guardian, the UK newspaper that has among its stated goals, to be the world's leading liberal voice. This is not an outlet that purports to be impartial. This is an outlet that's very clear about its editorial position and its underlying worldview. And it's, of course, not alone. Historically, many newspapers have been explicitly, partisan in their editorial line. In America, it's perhaps, most prominently associated with cable television and talk radio. And of course, online too, we see, many voices, both journalistic and news media and others that are very clear, about their, line and their view of the world and make, no attempts to present themselves as impartial, even as others, still hew to that notion or have committed to it, as they entered this digital media environment.

Mitali: And I was going to ask what the alternatives to impartial news are. But I think you've explained that a little bit. Being explicit about what stance you're taking, being partisan, etc. It's a question we've delved into in the past, in previous iterations of the report. Rasmus, why did it feel pertinent to explore at this moment in time?

Rasmus: I think there are both principled and practical reasons for revisiting this theme, and getting a sense of how the public at large and different groups within the public, in different countries think about this issue. I think the principled one is that there is a long-running principled critique of the notion of impartiality from some parts of journalism, some parts of scholarship, some parts of society who are of the view that impartiality is at best impossible. And at worst, an injustice in that it risks coming across as a false balance of he-said-she-said journalism that treats, morally, fundamentally unlike positions or epistemologically fundamentally unlike positions as if they were equal, and allow 'views on the shape of the earth differ' type discussions to proliferate in public debate, or treat forms of discourse that some might regard as hate speech as if they are an equal and legitimate part of public discourse and should be treated as such, or for that matter, people with a long record of, serial falsehoods and fabrication as if they are authoritative and legitimate sources on par with others.

So I think there is a principled critique of the notion of impartiality that's always been with journalism, going back centuries, but has been accentuated in recent years. And I think that's just part of the practical reason that we wanted to look at this again. many of us, around the world live in, deeply disputatious societies characterised by great disagreement about the big issues of our time. We see violent polemics on social media. We see aggressively partisan, discourse in parts of the news media as well. And in this context, where there is such an abundance of very partisan discourse and so many reasons, for people to disagree. I think it is an open question, at least as we went into this research as to whether what we have found before about the relatively strong public desire for some notion of impartiality in news at least, still holds up.

Public preference and demographic patterns ↑

Mitali: Let's unpack some of the central findings, on sort of the most crucial question, what proportion of people say they prefer impartial news versus news that takes that explicit position. What did we find?

Rasmus: Just to be clear about how this functions in the research, right, is that the question that we ask all the respondents and all the different markets across the globe covered by the digital news report in the 2026 edition is we ask sort of a top-level question where we say, thinking about the different kinds of news that's available: what do you prefer - getting news from sources that share your point of view, getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view, getting news from sources that challenge your point of view, or of course, respondents can opt for saying that they don't know. This is the way in which we put it to the respondents as a general question about news overall and their own preference about whether they seek what we might broadly think of as impartial news, or whether they want news that's aligned with their views or even news that might challenge their pre-existing views.

The top line across all 48 markets is that nearly half of our respondents say that they prefer getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view. this is essentially twice as many as say that they, in general prefer getting news from sources that share their point of view. So, a clear plurality, who say that they have a preference in general for, news that we might think of, broadly speaking, as impartial. And many more than opt for any of the other options that we offer in the survey.

Now, I should hasten to add here that this is self-reported. This is what people tell us. And also that on closer inspection, of course, it'll be the case that, some of the people who say they prefer news from sources that don't have a particular point of view, may also engage with news sources that are clearly partisan. And in some cases, they might even primarily engage with news sources that you or I might think of as clearly partisan, but in their eyes are perhaps, to be seen as more impartial or neutral, even if we might second guess that judgment. So it's really important to be clear here. This is what people say that they prefer. And sometimes there'll be a slight variation in terms of actual behavior that might complicate that, that narrative. But generally, I think the top line finding is very clear. twice as many people say they prefer, broadly speaking impartial news as say they prefer, news from sources that share their point of view.

Mitali: A two-part question then, because we've dipped into this question or dipped into this area a couple of times in the past, has it changed in terms of the findings over the years? And the second is, there has been a body of sort of study in terms of whether different age groups respond differently to news and their beliefs around it. Were there any demographic differences that you could spot there?

Rasmus: Yeah. I mean, on the question of change first, the last time we fielded these questions was back in 2020. And in the intervening period, I think there is a clear intensification of social media discourse in particular, but also some forms of news media discourse in many societies and also greater partisan rancor in at least some of the countries that we cover in the report. So we fielded these questions, in part because we were interested to see if there had been any large-scale change in general public sentiment on this issue.

But actually, I think the most important takeaway when comparing the data from 2020 with the most recent data from 2026 is that there hasn't actually been all that much change in the top line. There has been a slight decrease in the number of people who say they prefer getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view, but it's really only a few percentage points, and the overall picture is still very clear that it's many more respondents than opt for any of the other options. And as a matter of fact, the share of respondents who say they prefer getting news from sources that share their point of view has also decreased. So it's not that there has been a move in the direction of a greater express preference for more attitude-consistent information that one might have expected.

And in fact, perhaps the most significant change, is that the number of respondents who say that they don't know has really markedly increased from just under 14%, last time to 19% this time. About a fifth of our respondents, don't really feel they're in a position to even offer a view on this question that we asked them in terms of differences by group. Again, I think it is important to keep front and center here the big picture, which is that across, most sort of socio-economic groups and most political views, at least at the aggregate across the countries and markets that we cover in the report, the picture is very similar in most groups. There is a clear plurality who say they prefer getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view. But there is a tendency that amongst, younger people, and, amongst, people with, lower levels of formal education. There is a slightly smaller plurality, that opt for broadly speaking impartiality. And in particular, for those with low levels of formal education, there's a much greater number who say that they don't know what they prefer and who don't express a point of view.

Personal views and country differences ↑

Mitali: Were there any differences in terms of personal versus societal preferences, or do people extend or have a different set of ideas in their mind around impartiality at a personal level versus what they think about at a societal level?

Rasmus: So the reason we have data on this is that we were interested in exploring at least the potential for something that media and communications researchers call the third-person effect: the idea that the idea that sometimes we as individuals think about our own relationship with the media in one way, but think about other people, the sort of unknown third person's relationship with the media in a very different way. For example, people tend to think that they themselves are quite resilient in the face of misinformation or quite able to withstand the persuasive power of advertising, but often think that other people are quite susceptible to misinformation and advertising. These are classic examples of the third-person effect.

So we were interested in the question of whether this was the case for people's perception of the relative desirability of relatively impartial news. But as a matter of fact, we find that people's preferences when it comes to their own news, and also when we ask the follow-up question about what kind of news they think other people in society should mainly engage with, the answers are almost perfectly aligned. In fact, it seems that people, at least when responding to these survey questions, have very consistent views on this matter. They believe not only that, relatively impartial news is right for them individually, but they also tend to believe that it's, what they would like other people to engage with, when it comes to news.

Mitali: A large part of the richness of this report is our ability to look at country differences. What sort of variation did we find across countries in this attitude? And did it sort of fold in with other preferences that we have found around news consumption?

Rasmus: Yeah. I mean, there are always going to be differences across the world. It's a wonderful, manifold world. And of course, with a report that covers more than half of the world's population, it would be exceedingly unlikely that public preferences and views of the news would be entirely consistent across all these different countries and markets, and that indeed is the case here as well. So it's the case that in half the markets that we cover - 24 - half or more of the public say they prefer getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view. In another 16 markets, pluralities are the largest share of the respondents who opt for this option. But it is also the case that in the remaining eight markets, which does include really important and populous countries in the majority world, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Thailand, and a few others, there is actually a plurality of respondents who say that they prefer getting news from sources that share their point of view. There are very important, examples of countries where public opinion on this matter is a bit different from the general trend across the markets that we cover. And these are also, markets that often have a different history, in terms of journalism, but also more broadly in terms of politics and culture in some cases, countries where, very, independent and oppositional journalism has played a particularly important role in the struggle against colonial oppressors, for example, or other unfortunate kinds of regimes.

There are also countries where, politics might have a different texture from some of the other markets that we cover or for that matter, where people access news in a different way. So as you allude to in your question, we try to sort of get a better handle on, well, what are some of the factors might contribute to these differences across, different countries and different markets and what the public's preferences when it comes to the question of impartial or more explicitly partisan news.

And I really need to stress here very clearly that, there are limits to what one can analyze on the basis of survey data alone. We know from, of course, the experience of journalists and others, but also from reams of academic research that trust in news is highly influenced by politics, by people's perception of different institutions in society, their level of interpersonal trust and other factors that we're not measuring or documenting in the Digital News Report survey.

There are many factors that will influence, people's, perception, and preference when it comes to news that we aren't measuring here. But there are some that we are measuring here and that we wanted to explore. And here I want to highlight two. Really. One is the question of of point of access. Is it the case that when it comes to people's preference for, relatively more impartial news or relatively more explicitly partisan news, does this differ depending on how prominent, for example, social media, is as a point of access for news. Our thinking in looking at this was that we know from other research that, for example, social media, seems to foreground more partisan and polarising content and does seem to have a contributing role in eroding trust in news over time. It's very possible, we thought that, countries where people have a higher reliance on social media for news, might also see different attitudes when it comes to impartiality.

And the other thing we wanted to look at was the question of political polarisation. Here we rely on data from the V-Dem project, where experts assessed the level of political division in the society. And the thinking here was that, in societies characterised by deeper, more fundamental, more antagonistic political divisions, people might think about the issue of impartiality differently. Now, what do we find then when we look at these two, different possible contributing factors?

Social media first: There seems to be a clear and statistically significant relationship between, how many people in a country say they rely on social media as their main source of news, and how many people say they prefer getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view. So, we're not suggesting this is necessarily causal, and the correlation is not as pronounced at the individual level as it is at the societal level. And all of this, we would be the first to underline is complicated, but it is important to recognise that all else being equal, in countries where more people rely on social media as a main source of news, there is a clear tendency that fewer people say they prefer getting news from sources that don't have a particular point of view.

Polarisation second: the picture is a lot less clear. So there is a sort of a weak correlation between, how divided, the v-dem, expert survey suggest that a society is and, and how many people say they prefer impartial, news, but it's a much weaker relationship. And it's not at all clear that one can see this as a direct driving factor in one direction, because there might be a situation where, yes, some people may lose faith in the idea of impartial news, but others perhaps double down on it as they see these very polarised political environments. The relationship is much less clear. Slight correlation, some tendency in that direction. But we should be much more hesitant before assuming that there is a direct relationship here.

Creators, partisanship and publisher takeaways ↑

Mitali: There is a paradox here for news organisations that have been watching with some concern over the years, with sort of the rise of news creators and that phenomenon. How does one square the two between the preference, the stated preference for impartial news versus this apparent attraction towards partisan, outspoken figures in news?

Rasmus: I mean, I understand entirely why many journalists or editors and other public figures might do a little bit of a double take when they see this. A strong and enduring, expressed public preference for news that does not take a particular point of view. Because I think the daily reality that many journalists and editors and other public figures inhabit is, as I said, a daily media experience where rancor and division and hostile criticism and partisan polemics loom large and really, command a lot of attention and can press themselves upon people, sometimes in quite unpleasant ways.

But I think on closer inspection, I think it becomes easier to understand how we can live in a world where we have simultaneously this very visible and consequential, volume of partisan polemics and principled, vigorous disagreement while also at the same time living in a world in which many citizens tend to prefer, more impartial forms of news, and essentially what it has to do with is that the people, in our survey who say they prefer getting news from sources that share their point of view are people who are significantly more likely to share and comment on news online and on social media. They are people who are significantly more likely to be very or extremely interested in news and in politics. They are significantly more likely to place themselves at the left or the right end of the political spectrum, rather than somewhere in the middle, or not having a political stance. And they are significantly more likely to access news many times a day, and also to pay for online news.

So they are a minority, the ones who seek partisanship, but they do play an outsise role, because they are more visible and frankly, because they are more commercially important, for many news organisations than the silent majority or silent plurality who continue to prefer, relatively impartial forms of news.

Mitali: Finally, what could the takeaways be for news organisations on both sides: those that do sort of work towards an impartial news approach and those that don't.

Rasmus: I mean, I think first of all, it's important to, again, keep the top line finding here in mind. There clearly still is a large-scale, significant public desire for some form of impartial news. These may not be the most commercially attractive and most engaged parts of the public, but it's by far the largest part of the public, a clear majority in many countries and a plurality in a large number of other countries. So there clearly still is public demand for this. And thus there should be opportunities both for public service, for non-profit and indeed for commercial media to meet that demand from large parts of the public.

At the same time, it's also clear that our data and our analysis does suggest that there are real challenges facing the provision and ideal of impartial news. There is the commercial attraction of doubling down and trying to super-serve the highly engaged, more partisan minority of people who explicitly say they want news that confirms their point of view and align with their point of view. So they are more commercially attractive and they may, attract a greater share of provision, than their, fellow citisens.

It's also clear that as we see a sort of a broad-based shift towards a greater and greater role for social media and other kinds of digital platforms. given that these platforms, do seem to go hand in hand with a preference for more, full-throated, and perhaps opinionated forms of media, there too, there is a pressure on those who aspire to provide, duly impartial news. So there are real pressures here, but again, we should not lose sight of the top line that again, in 2026, we find that a much larger share of the public say that they prefer to get news from sources that don't have a particular point of view. And they outnumber those who say they want news from sources that share their point of view by about two to one.

Mitali: Thank you for joining us for our podcast today.

Rasmus: Pleasure.