When Meaning Becomes Scarce
Updated: 2 days ago
By Dr. Metin Oktay, Chairman, The Global Council on Media and Communication, Salvator Mundi Global. Analysis, 7 September 2026.
The world solved the problem of distributing information. It did not solve the problem of deciding what deserves to be believed. That failure is now affecting trust, investment, governance and the distribution of economic power between nations.
The paradox of abundance
Roughly six billion people, about three-quarters of humanity, now use the internet, against some 3.2 billion a decade ago. Mobile broadband covers nearly the entire planet and 5G networks already reach more than half the world's population. This is the most connected moment in human history.
Yet the institutions responsible for turning connectivity into understanding are in visible retreat. The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report, drawn from a sample of 97,520 respondents across 48 markets, found that just 37 per cent of people say they trust the news most of the time. That is the lowest figure since the survey began measuring trust in 2015, and it fell in 29 of the 48 markets in a single year. Forty-two per cent say they actively avoid the news at least some of the time, against 29 per cent when the question was first asked in 2017.
The abundance is real. So is the scarcity. What has become scarce is not information but the shared, verifiable, commonly held account of events on which collective decisions depend. That is the central problem of media and communication in 2026, and it does not belong to journalists alone. It belongs to anyone who needs a functioning public in order to govern, invest, legislate, treat, insure or build.
A trust recession, measured
Declining trust in media is usually discussed as sentiment. The data suggest something structural. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer describes a shift from grievance to insularity: seven in ten respondents report unwillingness or hesitancy to trust people with different values, backgrounds or information sources, rising to 90 per cent in Japan and 81 per cent in Germany. Only 39 per cent encounter news from ideologically different sources even weekly.
The same study records the trust gap between high- and low-income respondents widening from six points in 2012 to fifteen in 2026, and identifies misinformation as one of the principal forces reshaping trust over five years, cited by half of all respondents. Major news organisations registered a net trust loss of eleven points; trust in neighbours, family and friends rose by eleven.
Trust has not disappeared. It has relocated, from institutions that can be held accountable to networks that cannot.
That relocation matters because proximity is a poor proxy for accuracy. A neighbour is not a substitute for a court reporter. The retreat into trusted circles feels like prudence and works like insulation.
Where the audience went
In 2026, averaged across 48 markets, social media and video networks became the most widely used source of news, reaching 54 per cent of respondents weekly, ahead of television at 52 per cent and news organisations' own websites and apps at 51 per cent. The Reuters Institute cautions that the two-point margin over television is narrow. The trend line is the finding, not the gap: use of television and of publishers' own properties has fallen by 13 and 12 percentage points respectively since 2020, while platform use held steady and then moved ahead. Asked to name their main source, 30 per cent now say social media and video networks, up from 22 per cent five years ago, and 12 per cent use nothing else, double the 2020 figure. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 52 per cent name social platforms, video networks or AI chatbots as their main route to news, 32 points clear of anything else.
This would matter less if the migration were trust-neutral. It is not. Trust in news on social media stands at 22 per cent globally and in AI chatbot answers at 20 per cent, against 37 per cent for news overall. Audiences are drifting toward the channels they trust least, and they know it: concern about false or misleading information online rose four points this year to 62 per cent. Convenience is beating confidence.
Two corrections to the prevailing narrative are warranted. AI has not yet displaced journalism at the point of consumption: weekly use of chatbots for news rose from 7 to 10 per cent, fast growth from a small base rather than a rupture. And creators are mostly additive. Some 27 per cent encountered news from news-focused creators in the past week, but only 3 per cent rely on creators alone, and creator audiences consume more traditional news than average.
What is unambiguous is disengagement. The proportion describing themselves as extremely or very interested in news has fallen by an average of 13 percentage points since 2021, from 59 per cent to just under 46, while casual or passive users rose from 16 to 25 per cent. In the United States, trust in news has fallen to 25 per cent, and to 15 per cent among right-leaning Americans. A public that is not merely misinformed but disengaged is a harder problem.
The cost of silence
The clearest evidence that journalism is infrastructure rather than commentary is what happens when it stops. In the United States, where the decline is best documented, Northwestern University's Medill Local News Initiative recorded 136 newspaper closures in the year to autumn 2025. Close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished since 2005, almost 40 per cent of the country's local titles, along with more than 270,000 newspaper jobs. There are now 213 counties with no local news outlet and a further 1,524 with only one, leaving some 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news.
The consequences are measurable in currency. In the Journal of Financial Economics, Gao, Lee and Murphy examined municipalities before and after their local newspaper closed. Borrowing costs rose by five to eleven basis points, an additional 650,000 US dollars per bond issue. The effect was causal rather than a reflection of underlying decline, and came with higher government wages and larger deficits. Where nobody is watching, governing becomes more expensive, and the taxpayer pays the difference without being told why.
Accountability journalism is not a cultural amenity. It is a cost-of-capital variable.
One counter-trend deserves recording honestly. More than 300 local news startups launched in the five years to 2025, some 80 per cent digital-only, and several are thriving. But they cluster in metropolitan areas with philanthropic and advertising bases, leaving rural coverage thinnest precisely where public broadcasting is also under funding pressure.
Falsehood's structural advantage
The most cited finding in this field remains among the most uncomfortable. Vosoughi, Roy and Aral, analysing some 126,000 verified true and false stories shared by three million people on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, found falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than truth in every category examined. False stories were about 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted, and true stories took roughly six times as long to reach 1,500 people. The effect was strongest for political content. Automated accounts spread true and false material at the same rate: the asymmetry was human.
That finding predates generative AI by half a decade. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, drawing on more than 1,300 experts and leaders, ranks misinformation and disinformation the second most severe global risk over a two-year horizon, behind only geoeconomic confrontation, and the third consecutive year near the top. Adverse outcomes of AI show the sharpest movement of any risk across horizons, from thirtieth over two years to fifth over ten.
The report's important claim is not that falsehood is dangerous, which is obvious, but that it acts as an accelerant across other risks: polarisation, conflict, cyber insecurity and climate response all degrade faster in a corrupted information environment. Information integrity is not one policy area among many. It is a precondition for progress in the others.
Who is allowed to know
Two further asymmetries are routinely treated as separate issues when they are the same issue.
The first is access. Despite record connectivity, 2.2 billion people remain offline, 96 per cent of them in low- and middle-income countries. In low-income economies, 23 per cent of the population uses the internet, against 94 per cent in high-income ones. Some 77 per cent of men are online compared with 71 per cent of women, a gap of around 280 million that has barely narrowed since 2019, and urban connectivity stands at 85 per cent against 58 in rural areas. The right to know is not evenly distributed, and the gap is now defined less by whether a signal exists than by speed, affordability and skills.
The second is permission. Reporters Without Borders recorded in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index the worst global picture in the Index's 25-year history. For the first time, more than half of all countries assessed, 52.2 per cent, fall into the 'difficult' or 'very serious' categories, against 13.7 per cent in 2002. The share of the world's population living in a country rated 'good' for press freedom has collapsed from 20 per cent to less than one. Scores declined in 100 of 180 countries, and the legal indicator fell most sharply, deteriorating in 110, which RSF attributes to national security, defamation and emergency laws being used to criminalise reporting.
Behind the indices sit people. UNESCO's Director-General's report puts the global impunity rate for journalist killings at 85 per cent, down from 95 in 2012 but still a near-guarantee that whoever kills a reporter will not be convicted. UNESCO's separate World Trends report, covering 2022 to 2025, records 186 journalists killed while covering wars and conflict zones, a 67 per cent increase on the preceding period, alongside a 63 per cent rise in self-censorship among journalists and a ten per cent global decline in freedom of expression between 2012 and 2024.
The information advantage
These disparities are usually filed under rights. They belong equally under economics, and together they describe the least discussed inequality inside globalisation.
Globalisation moved capital, goods, people and information across borders at extraordinary speed. It did not equalise the capacity of societies to produce, verify, distribute and act upon information. Markets integrated faster than institutions, and the result is that two countries can share the same fibre-optic cables, the same handsets and the same AI systems while differing radically in their ability to convert information into economic value. One produces data, research, journalism, intellectual property and global narratives. The other largely consumes them.
The theory explaining why this matters is settled. The 2001 Nobel Prize in economic sciences went to George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz for establishing that asymmetric information is not a minor friction on otherwise efficient markets but a determinant of whether markets function at all. Akerlof's account of a used-car market unravelling because buyers cannot distinguish good vehicles from bad produced the general result: where quality cannot be verified, price stops sorting, honest sellers withdraw, and the market thins or disappears. Stiglitz's Nobel lecture extended the claim explicitly beyond markets into political economy. On that reading a country's press, universities, statistical agencies, and disclosure regimes are not cultural institutions attached to the economy. They are its verification infrastructure, and when they are weak, captured, or disbelieved, the cost does not stay inside public debate. It appears in the price of capital.
The sovereign evidence mirrors the municipal finding almost exactly. An IMF working paper examining 33 emerging and developing economies between 2005 and 2016 found that higher fiscal transparency reduced sovereign interest-rate spreads and increased foreign holdings of government debt, with openness of the budget process, the quality of published fiscal data and the accountability of fiscal actors each contributing distinctly. Investors do not price disclosure as a virtue. They price it as a reduction in variance.
What a closed newspaper does to a county, an unverifiable public record does to a country.
The governance channel runs alongside the financial one. Brunetti and Weder, in the Journal of Public Economics, found a robust relationship between greater press freedom and lower corruption across a large cross-section of countries, with evidence that causation runs from press freedom to reduced corruption rather than the reverse. The magnitudes are not marginal. The IMF's April 2019 Fiscal Monitor found that, comparing countries at similar income levels, the least corrupt governments collect four per cent of GDP more in tax revenue than the most corrupt. Verification capacity is, among other things, a revenue instrument.
The systems now competing globally are not variations on a single model. The 2026 RSF Index places China 178th of 180, with 121 journalists in detention, the highest number in the world, and Russia 172nd. It places the United States 64th, down seven places in a year and 47 since the Index began in 2002. These are not equivalent conditions and should not be described as if they were. Read together, though, they make a structural point rather than a moral one: state-directed and market-fragmented information systems fail differently, and each failure carries an economic signature. Where information is centrally controlled, reporting travelling upward tends to become unwilling to contradict authority, and errors are detected late. Where information is abundant but institutionally fragmented, no account commands enough assent to coordinate action. Neither environment prices risk well.
For emerging and developing economies, the asymmetry is sharper again. Many participate in the global information market without owning comparable institutions for producing information within it, importing platforms, technologies, financial narratives and political frames while exporting little of their own. Connectivity does not confer informational sovereignty: a citizen using an inexpensive mobile connection to consume material produced elsewhere is technically connected and economically peripheral. The distinction that matters is between access to information and capacity within it.
The World Bank anticipated this a decade ago. Its World Development Report 2016 asked why the spread of digital technology had delivered smaller development returns than expected and concluded that the dividends depend on what it called analog complements: regulation that sustains competition, workforce skills, and accountable institutions. Its warning was sharper than it is usually remembered as being. Greater access to information without accountable government does not produce transparency. It produces more effective control.
Where those complements are absent, uncertainty acquires a price. Capital demands a premium for what it cannot verify. Businesses hesitate where regulation is opaque. Corruption is easier where scrutiny is thin. Rumour competes more effectively where institutions have exhausted their credibility. And countries that cannot adequately tell their own economic story become dependent on others to tell it for them, on terms they do not set.
One qualification is owed. The municipal bond study is quasi-experimental and identifies a causal effect. The cross-country findings on transparency, press freedom and investment are associations drawn from panel and cross-sectional data, and the literature linking institutional quality to foreign direct investment is genuinely mixed, with results sensitive to specification and to which dimension of governance is measured. The direction of the evidence is consistent; its precision for any single country should not be overstated.
Even so, the strategic implication is hard to avoid. In an economy where value increasingly rests on claims that must be trusted before they can be priced, including credit ratings, emissions data, clinical results, supply-chain provenance and now the outputs of AI systems, the ability to establish what is true becomes a factor of production. The next digital divide will not be measured by who is online. It will be measured by who has the institutional capacity to know, the freedom to say what is known, the technology to distribute it, and the credibility to be believed. That is why media development belongs inside economic development policy rather than beside it.
What actually works
A diagnosis that ends in alarm is not useful. The evidence on remedies is thinner than the evidence on harms, but it is not empty.
Pre-emptive resilience outperforms correction after the fact. Roozenbeek, van der Linden and colleagues, writing in Science Advances, tested five short videos that expose people to the techniques of manipulation, including emotionally manipulative language, false dichotomies and scapegoating, rather than to individual false claims. Across six randomised controlled studies (n = 6,464) and a field study on YouTube (n = 22,632), the videos improved recognition of those techniques and people's ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content, and improved the quality of their sharing decisions. Because the intervention targets method rather than subject matter, it transfers across topics and languages and can be delivered through ordinary advertising inventory. Correction after publication rarely reaches the audience that saw the original claim; inoculation reaches them first.
Public service media remain disproportionately effective where they retain independence. Medill's analysis of broadcast signal contours found that primary public radio signals already reach 46 per cent of news desert counties, rising to 82 per cent when repeaters are included. The infrastructure to serve underserved communities largely exists. What is contested is its funding.
And audiences have not abandoned the principles. In the 2026 Reuters findings, those who prefer news that does not take sides outnumber those who prefer news confirming their own view by more than two to one, and a similar share believe impartial news is best for others in society. The demand side of trustworthy media is intact. It is the supply side, and the economics beneath it, that have broken.
The obligation
Three conclusions follow from the evidence rather than from conviction.
First, information integrity should be treated as public infrastructure and funded, regulated and measured accordingly. Roads and water systems are not required to be profitable to be considered necessary. The municipal borrowing evidence, and its sovereign counterpart in the transparency literature, indicate that accountability reporting produces a quantifiable public return, which makes the case in the language finance ministries already speak.
Second, transparency is now a competitive asset rather than a compliance burden. Where audiences trust chatbot answers at 20 per cent and social platforms at 22, visible methodology, named sourcing, published corrections and disclosed use of AI are among the few remaining ways to distinguish a claim from an assertion. The same logic applies to states: disclosure has become a term of trade.
Third, the objective cannot be restoring a lost consensus. That consensus rested on scarcity of distribution, which is not coming back. The realistic objective is a public capable of disagreeing productively because it shares a factual floor. That is a lower ambition than the twentieth century's, and a more achievable one.
The decisive divide of the next phase of globalisation may therefore not be between connected and unconnected societies, but between societies capable of converting information into trusted knowledge and those increasingly forced to navigate without it.
Whoever shapes the story shapes the society. The measurements now available tell us, with unusual precision, what it costs when nobody is left to shape it well.
The Global Council on Media and Communication convenes practitioners, researchers and policymakers on questions of information integrity, media independence and public communication.
References
Akerlof, G.A. (1970) 'The market for “lemons”: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), pp. 488–500. doi:10.2307/1879431
Brunetti, A. and Weder, B. (2003) 'A free press is bad news for corruption', Journal of Public Economics, 87(7–8), pp. 1801–1824. doi:10.1016/S0047-2727(01)00186-4
Edelman (2026) 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust is in Peril as Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity. New York: Edelman. Available at: https://www.edelman.com/news-awards/2026-edelman-trust-barometer-society-slides-into-insularity
Egan, J. (2026) 'Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report', Digital News Report 2026. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Available at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary
Gao, P., Lee, C. and Murphy, D. (2020) 'Financing dies in darkness? The impact of newspaper closures on public finance', Journal of Financial Economics, 135(2), pp. 445–467. doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2019.06.003
International Monetary Fund (2019) Fiscal Monitor: Curbing Corruption, April 2019, ch. 2. Washington, DC: IMF. Available at: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/FM/Issues/2019/03/18/fiscal-monitor-april-2019
International Telecommunication Union (2025) Measuring Digital Development: Facts and Figures 2025. Geneva: ITU. Available at: https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2025/
Kemoe, L. and Zhan, Z. (2018) Fiscal Transparency, Borrowing Costs, and Foreign Holdings of Sovereign Debt. IMF Working Paper WP/18/189. Washington, DC: IMF. doi:10.5089/9781484373835.001
Medill Local News Initiative (2025) The State of Local News 2025. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Available at: https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/
Reporters Without Borders (2026) 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Paris: RSF. Available at: https://rsf.org/en/2026-rsf-index-press-freedom-25-year-low
Roozenbeek, J., van der Linden, S., Goldberg, B., Rathje, S. and Lewandowsky, S. (2022) 'Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media', Science Advances, 8(34), eabo6254. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abo6254
Stiglitz, J.E. (2002) 'Information and the change in the paradigm in economics', American Economic Review, 92(3), pp. 460–501. doi:10.1257/00028280260136363
UNESCO (2024) Director-General's Report on the Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity. Paris: UNESCO. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/safety-journalists/dg-report-safety-journalists
UNESCO (2025) World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development Report 2022–2025: Journalism: Shaping a World at Peace. Paris: UNESCO. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/world-media-trends
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D. and Aral, S. (2018) 'The spread of true and false news online', Science, 359(6380), pp. 1146–1151. doi:10.1126/science.aap9559
World Bank (2016) World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0671-1
World Economic Forum (2026) The Global Risks Report 2026. 21st edn. Geneva: World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/
Note on sourcing and inference: all statistics are drawn from the primary publications listed. Reuters Institute figures are based on a total sample of 97,520 respondents across 48 markets; the 54/52/51 per cent figures denote weekly use of each source rather than stated main source, and the Institute itself cautions that the two-point margin over television is narrow. Impunity data are from UNESCO's 2024 Director-General's report; conflict-zone killings, self-censorship and freedom-of-expression trend data are from UNESCO's 2022–2025 World Trends report. The tax-revenue comparison is from chapter 2 of the April 2019 Fiscal Monitor. Gao, Lee and Murphy (2020) is quasi-experimental and reports a causal estimate; Kemoe and Zhan (2018) and Brunetti and Weder (2003) report panel and cross-sectional associations with instrumented evidence on the direction of causation, and should be read as directionally rather than precisely applicable to any individual country.
About the Author
Dr. Metin Oktay
Chairman of the Global Council on Media and Communication, Salvator Mundi Global
Founder of M3TIN Records and Chairman of M&H Logistics, an international freight forwarding company. His career spans media relations and the entertainment sector, built on senior executive positions in aerospace, energy and mining.
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