Trust

MORI have published their annual survey on trust in professionals, carried out for the Royal College of Physicians. Doctors are the most trusted of the professions MORI asked about (as indeed they always are!). As Bob Worcester says on the results page, the most surprising thing about the survey is probably the lack of change over the years.

We might expect to find that politicans and ministers are distrusted as never before, but while they are indeed two of the least trusted professions, with net trustworthyness ratings of -49 for ministers and -58 for politicians, this isn't actually vastly different to the scores they've had for the last 8 years, and higher than they were in the final days of the last Conservative government. (The other highly distrusted group was journalists, though this probably does them a disservice - YouGov occassionally do similar surveys and separate out broadsheet and tabloid journalists: it's the latter people really distrust, broadsheet journalists are viewed quite positively.)

Nearly all the professions asked about are trusted slightly less than they were last year, with the exception of judges (they were also the odd ones out in the YouGov poll above), though the movements are all small. The only group where there does appear to be a really significan trend over time is TV newsreaders. Their net trustworthyness is now +34, whereas in most previous years they tended to be in the 40s or 50s - in 1997 their net rating was +60 and they were the third most trusted profession. It's interesting to ponder what has made the shift, the signs were there before the various crises of trust in the BBC last year, perhaps it is just the general movement towards younger presenters rather than the gravitas of past decades.