Australians don’t trust the media. This isn’t news—trust in journalism has been declining for years. But the scale of the problem is staggering. Surveys consistently show that journalists rank alongside politicians and used car salespeople in public trust. That’s not a healthy situation for democracy.

The question is why, and what can be done about it.

The easy answer is to blame social media, partisan polarisation, or politicians who attack the press. All of those factors contribute. But they’re not the whole story. Australian media has made choices that have systematically eroded trust, and until we acknowledge those choices, the problem won’t get better.

Let’s start with the obvious: concentration of media ownership. A handful of companies control most of what Australians read, watch, and hear. When people talk about “the media,” they’re often talking about News Corp and Nine Entertainment. That concentration creates the perception—often accurate—that coverage reflects the interests of a few powerful people rather than serving the public.

You can’t have trust without independence, and you can’t have independence when the industry is dominated by billionaires with political agendas. This isn’t a secret or a conspiracy theory—it’s the structure of Australian media. And audiences aren’t stupid. They can see when coverage consistently favours certain political positions.

Then there’s the blurring of news and opinion I’ve written about before. When readers can’t tell whether they’re reading reported facts or someone’s political takes, trust evaporates. If everything looks like opinion, nothing can be trusted as news.

Australian media organisations have been particularly bad about this. Opinion columnists appear on news programs. News reporters write opinion columns. The same byline might give you straight reporting one day and partisan advocacy the next. How is a reader supposed to know which mode they’re in?

The commercial pressures make this worse. Clickbait headlines, sensationalised stories, coverage optimised for engagement rather than accuracy—all of these erode trust. Every time someone clicks a headline that wildly misrepresents the actual story, they trust media a little bit less. Every time a story is “updated” because the initial version was wrong, confidence declines.

And then there’s accountability, or the lack thereof. When journalists make mistakes—and everyone makes mistakes—how often do you see genuine corrections, apologies, or explanations of what went wrong? More often, errors just quietly disappear, or get buried in a corrections section nobody reads.

Compare that to how one consulting group I know handles project issues. When something goes wrong, they document what happened, why it happened, and what they’re doing to prevent it happening again. Radical transparency, they call it. It builds trust because clients can see the organisation takes accountability seriously.

Australian media could learn from that approach. Instead of hiding mistakes, explain them. Instead of defensiveness, show humility. Instead of pretending journalism is infallible, acknowledge its limitations and commit to doing better.

Some will say trust has declined because audiences are more fragmented, everyone gets their news from echo chambers, and people just don’t trust institutions anymore. There’s truth to that. But it’s also a convenient excuse that lets media organisations avoid responsibility for their own failures.

Because here’s the thing: some outlets are trusted more than others. The ABC consistently ranks higher in trust surveys than commercial media. International publications like The Guardian and The New York Times maintain stronger credibility than many Australian outlets. Trust is possible—it just requires earning it.

What would that look like? For starters, actual independence from political and commercial pressure. Diversifying ownership would help, though that’s unlikely to happen without regulatory change. More realistically, individual journalists and organisations could be more transparent about their processes, their limitations, and their mistakes.

It would also mean being honest about what journalism can and can’t do. We can report facts, investigate wrongdoing, provide analysis. We can’t predict the future with certainty, we can’t be neutral about everything, and we will sometimes get things wrong. Acknowledging that wouldn’t undermine trust—it would build it by being honest.

Investment in actual journalism rather than commentary would help too. Investigative reporting, beat coverage, local journalism—these build trust because they provide information people can’t get elsewhere. Hot takes from the same columnists about the same topics don’t build trust; they just reinforce existing divisions.

And crucially, Australian media needs to stop treating audiences with contempt. The assumption that readers are too dumb to handle complexity, too impatient for nuance, too tribal to engage with opposing views—that’s insulting, and it shows in the coverage. Treat audiences like adults capable of critical thinking, and you might be surprised by the response.

I’m not naive about this. The structural problems are real, and many are beyond any individual journalist’s or organisation’s control. Ownership concentration, business model collapse, platform dominance—these aren’t easily solved.

But the things that are within media’s control—transparency, accountability, clear distinctions between news and opinion, investment in quality journalism—those could make a real difference. And right now, most Australian media organisations aren’t doing them.

The trust deficit didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of choices made over years, often in service of short-term commercial interests over long-term credibility. Reversing it will require different choices.

The question is whether Australian media will make them, or whether we’ll keep racing to the bottom, blaming everyone else for the trust we’ve squandered ourselves.

I know which I’d bet on. But I’d love to be wrong.