A Month of Record-Low Trust, Real Deepfakes, and Widening Funding Gaps

June gave Asia-Pacific broadcasters a clear read on where things stand, and the numbers were not kind.

Link to June 2026 Dashboard: https://nabeeltirmazi.com/media-trends-June2026.html

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, published June 16 from nearly 100,000 interviews across 48 markets, put global trust in news at 37 percent, a record low, with news avoidance up two points to 42 percent. For the first time, social media and video platforms edged out television as the leading way people encounter news: 54 percent of respondents used those channels, against 52 percent for TV and 51 percent for news websites and apps. Weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7 to 10 percent year over year. More than half of 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed named social media, video, or AI as their main news source. Taken together, the report describes an audience relationship that has already shifted to platforms and assistants broadcasters don’t operate.

The picture wasn’t uniform, though. Singapore’s CNA came out of the same report as the country’s most trusted news brand, at 78 percent, up four points, with Mediacorp holding four of the top five trust rankings nationally and overall trust in Singapore sitting at 46 percent, well above the global average. That gap between the regional trend and one market’s result suggests the decline in trust is not automatic. Something in how CNA operates is working against the wider current.

Synthetic media stopped being a hypothetical this month. In late June, an AI-generated video of West Papuan activist Koteka Wenda began circulating, showing her appearing to criticize a documentary she had never actually commented on. She described it publicly as a form of digital colonization. Separately, regional fraud-monitoring reports through June pointed to a sharp year-on-year rise in deepfake-enabled fraud across Asia-Pacific, with Malaysia and the Maldives named among the fastest-growing markets, though the specific percentage figures cited vary by vendor and should be read as directional rather than precise.

Money and law moved on their own tracks. In New Zealand, roughly a quarter of Te Māngai Pāho’s annual funding, around NZ$16 million, expired June 30, and more than twenty iwi radio stations rejected the cut outright and are weighing legal action. In Vietnam, amendments to the press law that compel journalists to disclose sources and expand the definition of “state secrets” are set to take effect July 1, with the operational detail still unpublished as June closed, leaving newsrooms and legal teams with a live compliance question and no clear guidance.

On the industry-conference side, AI adoption kept surfacing as the dominant topic. WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India 2026 conference, held June 24 and 25 in New Delhi, ran sessions specifically on navigating AI in digital journalism. Regional broadcasting bodies continued to discuss AI’s role in disaster and emergency communication, echoing a broader industry pattern in which Asian broadcasters have shown more willingness to experiment with AI tools, including AI-generated presenters, than their Western counterparts.

What connects these threads is not AI itself but the absence of settled rules around it. Trust is falling as discovery shifts to AI-mediated platforms with no clear attribution standard. Synthetic media is now hitting named individuals with no established verification playbook. Funding and legal deadlines are landing with little advance warning. None of this is speculative, it happened in a single month, and it happened in public.

The institutions that come out ahead over the next few months will likely be the ones that treat June’s numbers as a baseline to work from, not a news cycle to wait out.

The June 2026 Media Leaders Intelligence Dashboard is available in full at the link below. If your organisation needs a leadership briefing based on these signals, reach out at strategy@nabeeltirmazi.com.