I hate to give props to a competitor but I'll make an exception in this case because I know a few Imagethief readers work at our crosstown rivals, Edelman. I've been having a read of Edelman's China Stakeholder Survey (pdf). which I stumbled upon via Thomas Crampton.

According to the notes the survey is based on face to face interviews with 140 people in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, representing six "stakeholder* groups": government, NGOs, institutional investors, media, senior business executives and consumers. The survey reports on the levels of trust the respondents assign to these same stakeholder groups.

Ignore for a moment the ghastly word, "stakeholder", an overused piece of PR jargon that sounds like it refers to a character from Ghostbusters or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (This is not Edelman's faul. We're all guilty.) As Thomas noted, the survey indicates that the Internet is on the rise in terms of trust while other media are falling. That's interesting if not unexpected. What really caught my eye was the slide number 12, titled "Trust in institutions by stakeholder":

 Edelman chart

Most of this is rather as you would expect. Government rates relatively high in trust (not a surprise in China, especially when referring to the central government), with NGOs, largely government-linked in China, also doing OK. Business and media bring up the rear.

Importantly, this chart breaks out how the stakeholder groups assess themselves. Unsurprisingly, businessmen assess business as more trustworthy than the other stakeholders do. Similarly, government officials are most positive on the government and NGO respondents most positive on NGOs (with government also on their side).

So how do media respondents rate the trustworthiness of the media?

Rock bottom. Worse than any other stakeholder group, barring investors who couldn't be bothered to rate the media at all. (Oddly, these same investors rate the government quite highly, which raises some methodological questions that we'll get to in a moment.) You're looking at the dark blue column with a "5" over it in the far-right group. Thats 5 as in 5% of Chinese media respondents rate the Chinese media as trustworthy.

What does it say that every stakeholder group other than investors rates the trustworthiness of the media if not great than at least significantly higher than media respondents themselves do? Is it a question of perspective? Or is this an artifact of the methodology?

Or do the media respondents know something we don't?

Makes you wonder.

140 respondents isn't a huge pool and there is no detailed information on the methodology. The report covers trends over the past few years, but with a relatively small sample, especially when the pool of respondents is broken into stakeholder groups, substantial year-on-year changes aren't surprising. The "zero" response from investors in assessing media trustworthiness is a bit of an alarm bell. It would be nice to see the raw data, including the questionnaires used to guide the interviews and more information on the demographics, habits and backgrounds of the respondents. 

Can the media here really loathe themselves that much? There is no doubt that media is still a swamp in China, but come on, people, have some pride.

Keymaster

I am the Keymaster! Are you the Stakeholder?