Broken and distrusting: why Americans are pulling away from the daily news

This might be just another negative news story. And if it is, there is evidence that many of you will turn away in despair.

The Reuters Institute said that alongside the rising number of people avoiding news is a drop in trust in reporting in the US to the lowest point yet recorded at just 26% of the population.

So she rationed her consumption, cutting out television news altogether and waiting until later in the day to read the papers. But it kept coming at her on her phone and social media.

And yet major longstanding news organisations are sceptical because their audience numbers just keep growing. Professor Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, said that while there are short term peaks and troughs in engagement with the news around major events, the long term trend is up.

Bell said that part of the problem is how news now comes at us. Three decades ago, Americans would have read about the Rwandan genocide in the daily newspaper dropped on their doorstep, or heard about it on radio and television, and then turned the page or listened to the next news item. Perhaps they would have read about it again the next day.

Molly Bingham, the founder of Orb Media which reports on global efforts to create a more sustainable future, sees an additional problem in a loss of confidence in how news is covered.