Viewers trust TV most.

It seems as though the whole wide world is addicted to TV news. According to a new 10-country opinion poll by Reuters, the BBC and the U.S. Media Center, TV was seen globally as the most reliable news medium, and the source most people turned to for their news fixes. The survey--which polled 12,000 people across the U.S., Korea, the U.K., Germany, Russia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Nigeria--attempted to decode international perceptions of the media.

Each participant was asked to answer whether they trusted their country's media more than their government. In every country, barring the U.K., the U.S. and Korea (where trust levels were equal), the majority of respondents said they trust news sources more than their governments (not surprisingly, countries with have had high levels of corruption in public office, like Nigeria and India, recorded a higher level of trust in the media than in government). One possible explanation for the U.K. and U.S.'s distrust of their respective media could be the Iraq War, with citizens thinking the news is unbalanced in favor of the governments' pro-war stances.

Overall trust in the media in Britain has bounced back in the last four years, from a 29 percent low in 2002 to 47 percent today.

It was the Americans, however, who emerged as the most critical of their news media's balance, with 69 percent disagreeing that the media reports all sides of the story.

Overall, the survey suggested that TV was the most important source of news for most inhabitants of most countries, but a closer look at how young people are consuming media raises questions as to how long that will remain the case. One in five of respondents aged 18-to-24years-old cited online sources as their first choice for news, versus just three percent of those ages 55-64. And 71 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds said they valued the opportunity to get their news from the Internet and other wireless technologies. In countries where the Internet is more ubiquitous, the number of people relying on Internet news swells. In fact, in South Korea, where Internet penetration stands somewhere around 86 percent, a third of respondents cite the Internet as their most important source of news.

In terms of which media companies are most trusted, the U.K.'s BBC rules the roost (with a 48 percent trust rate), followed by the U.S.'s CNN (with 44 percent of viewers saying they trust it). Internet portals that received the highest trust ratings included Google (30 percent), Yahoo! (28 percent) and MSN (27 percent). Perhaps most interesting is the popularity and increased trust respondents place in Google, a site that brings together various news sources. It may be just another sign that consumers are increasingly questioning the established medias' reports, and looking to compare and contrast information from different sources.