Most Conservative voters say they don’t trust media reports on party leaders: poll

OTTAWA — A new poll suggests more than half of Conservative voters don’t trust what they see or hear about federal party leaders in the media during the current election campaign.

Fifty-six per cent of people who identified as Conservatives in the Leger poll said they had little trust — or none at all — in media reports about party leaders.

Just over one-quarter of Liberal voters who responded to the poll, and about two in five NDP voters, expressed a lack of trust in the media.

Leger polled 1,603 adults online from last Thursday through Monday of this week.

Online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

Canadians head to the polls for the general election on April 28.

Overall, 52 per cent of Canadians surveyed by Leger expressed some trust or a great deal of trust in media coverage of the leaders during the election campaign.

But 43 per cent said they were skeptical of what they were reading and hearing — a figure that troubles Patrick White, a journalism professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

“It’s quite worrisome and concerning to see that so many Canadians don’t trust news media coverage during such an important democratic moment,” White said.

“So I’m very concerned for the future.”

Seventy-three per cent of Liberal voters surveyed by Leger expressed trust in the media, compared to 50 per cent of New Democrats and just 41 per cent of Conservatives. Fifty-four per cent of Bloc Québécois supporters and 55 per cent of Green voters said they trusted media coverage.

White suggested more research is needed to fully understand the “huge gap” in trust levels between Liberal and Conservative voters.

He pointed to the generally stronger support in Liberal circles for government financial assistance for media outlets struggling to survive with dwindling advertising revenues.

Some Canadians are looking beyond mainstream outlets to right-leaning sources or are shunning the media altogether, White added.

“There is a huge phenomenon of news avoidance,” he said.

The survey found 64 per cent of respondents were somewhat or very concerned about the possibility of encountering fake or manipulated images, videos or audio clips during the election campaign.

Only 28 per cent said they had personally witnessed any attempts to mislead or misinform voters about a party, a candidate or the voting process.

White said Canadians have been expressing worries about manipulated content for the last two or three years, so it’s good news that only about one-quarter of those surveyed reported actually seeing it in the campaign.

“It seems to me like we still have good safeguards in the news ecosystem in Canada,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2025.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press