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Trust in Public Service News Providers: A comparison of the BBC and NHK

In this UK–Japan study, we examined how much people trust their national public broadcasters: the BBC in the UK and NHK in Japan. Over 19 months, we ran monthly surveys asking thousands of people how much they trust news from these public service providers, as well as from traditional media and social media.

We found that the BBC is still widely trusted in the UK, but that trust is sharply divided by politics. Conservative voters are much less likely to trust the BBC than Labour or Liberal Democrat supporters. In Japan, trust in NHK is more stable across the political spectrum, but it doesn’t stand out in the same way. Many Japanese respondents placed more trust in newspapers or even social media news than in NHK.

Public broadcasters still play a key role in the media landscape. But as our research shows, their credibility depends heavily on politics, structure, and national context.

• Pickering, S. D., & Sunahara, Y., & Hansen, M. E. (2025). Examining Trust in Public Service News Providers: A comparison of the BBC and NHK. Accepted for publication by Communications: The European Journal of Communications Research. Forthcoming.