Television holds its ground as Canada’s main news source, even as the audience ages

Canadians still turn to broadcast television for their news more than to any other source, a pattern that sets the country apart from its neighbor to the south.

That is one of the clearer takeaways from Pollara Strategic Insights’ fourth annual “Trust in Media” study, released June 22. The survey reached 2,510 Canadian adults online between April 14 and 23, alongside a matched sample of 2,514 American adults drawn from the same research panel.

For people who build and run broadcast operations, the report offers a useful look at a market that does not get measured as often as the United States does.

The headline number for the industry is straightforward: 53% of Canadians named television news reports as a main source for current events, ahead of every other channel tested. Affiliated online news sites and apps followed at 32%, radio at 27% and print newspapers at 16%.

That ranking matters because it runs against the direction many in the industry assume the audience is heading.

Television is not the legacy footnote it is sometimes made out to be, at least not in Canada. The question the data raises is not whether broadcast still reaches people. It clearly does. The question is who those people are, and how long the current mix will hold.

The audience skews older

The strength of broadcast television rests heavily on older viewers. Among Canadians 65 and older, 75% cited TV news as a main source. That share falls to 60% for those 50 to 64, 45% for the 35-to-49 group and 31% for adults 18 to 34.

The same slope appears across individual outlets. Pollara asked how often respondents get news from specific organizations, and the daily-use figures by age tell the structural story. CTV News drew 25% daily use among 18-to-34s and 37% among those 65 and older. The Weather Network climbed from 31% daily use among the youngest group to 39% among seniors. Global News held a narrower band, from 25% to 28%.

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CBC News is the interesting exception. Its daily reach stayed close to flat across the age cohorts, at 33% among 18-to-34s and 39% among seniors, with the middle groups in between. Among the major broadcasters, the public network retains the steadiest hold on younger daily viewers. That is worth noting for an organization whose audience composition is a recurring point of political debate.

The historical comparison sharpens the point.

Pollara’s tracking shows that in the 1990s younger Canadians were more trusting of the news media than older ones. That relationship has now flipped. Net trust in the news media among seniors stands at plus 38, while the 18-to-34 group sits at plus 5. For broadcasters, that inversion is the demographic curve to watch, because trust and habit tend to travel together.

A weather service leads on both reach and trust

The most consumed and most trusted Canadian outlet in the study is not a conventional newsroom.

The Weather Network topped the trust ranking for the fourth year running, with 78% of respondents calling it trustworthy and a net trust score of plus 65. Net trust here is simply the share who find an outlet trustworthy minus the share who do not, a clean measure for comparing brands.

There is a mild irony in the country’s most trusted news source being the one that mostly tells people whether to carry an umbrella, but the result is not an accident. Weather coverage is verifiable, apolitical and immediately useful, which is a fair description of the qualities audiences say they want. The Weather Network was also the only outlet to post a meaningful gain in daily use over the past year, up 7 points among those who watch most days.

The major networks followed close behind on trust. CBC posted 71% trustworthy and a net score of plus 51, CTV News reached 68% and plus 50, and Global News landed at 65% and plus 47. These are strong numbers in an environment where trust in news is generally described as mixed.

The figure broadcasters should sit with is the trust score among an outlet’s own users.

When Pollara isolated the people who actually watch each network, net trust jumped well above the general public’s view. CBC, CTV, Global and The Weather Network all landed between plus 86 and plus 87 among their viewers.

In plain terms, the people who tune in mostly believe what they see. The skepticism captured in the broader numbers comes disproportionately from non-viewers and from partisan distance rather than from regular audiences. That is a meaningful distinction for programmers and distributors. It suggests the trust problem facing broadcast news is less about the product viewers receive and more about reaching the people who have stopped showing up.

The partisan gap is widening

The report also documents a trust divide that has grown sharper over three decades. In 1992 the gap in net trust between Liberal and Reform Party voters was 29 points. Today the gap between Liberal and Conservative voters is 54 points.

Public broadcasting carries the most exposure here. CBC’s net trust ran to plus 78 among Liberal voters and plus 9 among Conservative voters, a spread of 69 points, the largest of any outlet tested. Fox News, distrusted by Canadians overall at minus 17, moved up among Conservative voters this year to plus 1, after sitting at minus 20 the year before. The shifts are incremental, but the direction signals an audience sorting itself along familiar lines.

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Anyone planning national distribution should treat Quebec as a separate exercise. The Weather Network leads on trust in every region except Quebec, where Radio-Canada takes the top spot.

Among Quebec respondents, Radio-Canada drew 46% daily use and a 79% trustworthy rating. TVA followed at 44% daily use and 78% trustworthy, with Météo Média, the French-language counterpart to The Weather Network, at 41% and 71%. The French-language ecosystem keeps its own hierarchy, and the strong showing for domestic broadcasters there is consistent with the national picture.

What the numbers ask of broadcasters

Set against the United States, the Canadian results read as comparatively stable. Americans reported leaning harder on social platforms, with total social media use as a news source at 59% versus 51% in Canada, and lower trust in the news media overall at 45% against Canada’s 51%. Canadian broadcast television enters this period from a position of relative strength.

That strength is real, and it is also concentrated in viewers who will not be the audience indefinitely. Among Canadians 18 to 34, total social media use as a news source reached 71%, with YouTube alone at 41%. The gap between where younger audiences spend their attention and where broadcasters command trust is the central operational challenge in this data.

The encouraging signal is that trust is not the missing ingredient.

Canadians who watch broadcast news tend to believe it, and the major networks retain wide reach. The harder work is distribution: carrying that credibility onto the platforms where the next cohort of viewers already lives, without diluting the qualities that earned the trust in the first place. The audience is there. The task is meeting more of it where it is, before the demographic math forces the issue.