Twice as many people in the UAE than in the US have told a survey they trust the media. Edelman's annual Global Trust Barometer, which was released yesterday and included data on the UAE for the first time, found that 66 per cent of the respondents in the UAE trusted media companies, compared with 32 per cent in the US. The only countries out of the 22 surveyed where the media were more trusted than in the Emirates were Indonesia and Mexico.
"In certain western economies, people are always a little bit cynical about what they read and see in the media, whereas here, there is still quite a bit of trust in your newspaper articles and your company websites," said Ben Morton, the general manager of Edelman Middle East and Africa, which opened the regional headquarters of the public relations firm in Abu Dhabi last year. The scepticism towards media elsewhere in the world increased over the past year, the study showed. Globally, trust in media has fallen from 48 per cent to 43 per cent over the past three years of the study. In the most recent study, which was conducted last autumn, the media were the only institution to lose trust around the globe.
Meanwhile, trust in government has been rising globally, gaining 16 percentage points in the US over the past year. The UAE debuted on the study with one of the world's highest levels of trust in government at 67 per cent. The UAE residents found a company's website to be the most trustworthy source of information, with 67 per cent of respondents trusting it, with newspapers a close second at 62 per cent. The only country surveyed that trusted newspapers more was Singapore, which believed them 68 per cent of the time. In contrast, only 16 per cent of respondents in France and 21 per cent of respondents from the UK trusted newspapers.
Television news sources also ranked highly in the UAE, with a 61 per cent trust reading. Social media websites were among the least credible sources of information in the UAE, with only 39 per cent of respondents trusting them. But the websites are still more trusted in the UAE than they are in Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. Mr Morton believes this low trust rating is a result of how new sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are in places such as the UAE. Flickr, the photo sharing site, is still blocked, for example, while Twitter was unblocked only 18 months ago.
"I think we will see social media trust go up, because it's still a young industry here," he said. The UAE was in line with global trends in trusting technology companies most of all, with 85 per cent of respondents trusting them. Entertainment companies ranked unusually highly at 77 per cent, followed by banks at 75 per cent. The UAE's trust of banks also ranked among the highest in the world. Since 2007, trust in banks has dramatically declined in most western countries, dropping 39 points in the past three years in the US to 29 per cent.
But Mr Morton warned against making too much of the UAE's regard for banks in this case. The survey was conducted from September through to December of last year, so most of the interviews would have happened before Dubai World asked its lenders for a standstill on its debt on November 25. @Email:khagey@thenational.ae