Recent Immigrants More Likely to Have Confidence in Canadian Media: Statistics Canada

A man reads a newspaper while sitting on a park bench in downtown Vancouver, in a file photo. Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press

Recent immigrants are more likely to trust the media than people who were born in Canada or had spent more time here, federal data shows.

A report released by Statistics Canada on March 31 indicated that recent immigrants have a “substantially higher level of confidence” in the country’s media.

“For example, among South Asian people, 25 percent of those born in Canada had confidence in the Canadian media, compared with 57 percent of recent immigrants,” said the federal agency, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.

The data was drawn from the agency’s “Survey Series on People and Their Communities,” conducted nationwide from Oct. 14, 2022, to Jan. 3 of this year.

Participants were Canadians of various racial groups, and the survey segregated the responses of those who were born in Canada from those who recently immigrated (10 years or less) and those who had spent more than a decade here.

They were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 their confidence in Canada’s media, among several other institutions, where 1 means “No confidence at all” and 5 means “A great deal of confidence.”

Confidence

Trust in the media was highest among recent South Asian immigrants (57 percent), Filipinos (54 percent), West Asians (49 percent), Arabs, Latin Americans, Southeast Asians (each 47 percent), blacks (43 percent), and Chinese immigrants (42 percent).

The results took a turn for immigrants of similar racial groups who lived in Canada for more than 10 years.

Forty-five percent of Filipinos said they trusted the media, followed by 39 percent of South Asians, 34 percent of Chinese, 33 percent of blacks, and 29 percent of Arabs. Similar trends were noted among Latin Americans (38 percent), Southeast Asians (35 percent), and West Asians (35 percent).

Trust dipped even further among those who were born here. Only 21 percent of blacks, Filipinos, Arabs, and Latin Americans expressed confidence in the media while South Asians and Southeast Asians seconded at 25 percent each. The exception is the native-born Chinese Canadian citizens (36 percent) who rated more confidence in the media than the Chinese immigrants. The percentage for West Asians was reported at 17 percent, though the report stressed to “use [the figure] with caution.”

According to Statistics Canada, from an “overall” perspective, only about a third (33 percent) of Canadians surveyed reported a high level of trust in the media. It added that Japanese people in Canada generally were “less likely to be confident” in the institution as well.

‘Relationship Is Broken’

The sentiments echoed the findings of a study released last June by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which found Canadians who place their trust in the news fell from 58 percent to 42 percent in the preceding four years.

“Large numbers of people see the media as subject to undue political influence, and only a small minority believe most news organizations put what’s best for society ahead of their own commercial interest,” wrote Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of Reuters Institute, in the report.

Another study by marketing consultancy firm Edelman Canada in February 2022 found that 61 percent of Canadians believe journalists and reporters purposely try to mislead them “by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations,” with business leaders (60 percent) and government (58 percent) not far behind.

Testifying before the Commons Heritage committee last September, Peter Menzies, former vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, said mistrust in the media has been fuelled by government subsidies.

“The more government assistance news media gets, the more broken the relationship with readers becomes,” Menzies said.

“The more that relationship is broken, the more subsidies will be required.”