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John Burn-Murdoch at the _Financial Times _is the doyen of the info-graphic. He is a columnist and chief data reporter at the _FT _ and a senior fellow at LSE data science. No one does a

better job of creating striking visual images for data of all kinds. On 9 January Burn-Murdoch posted a graphic which illustrated the very different levels of trust in different news

organisations by the Right and Left in Britain and America (see below). (Copyright FT) What is immediately striking is the different levels of trust in news media organisations in Britain

and America according to YouGov. In the UK the gap in trust in particular newspapers, magazines and TV news organisations between Conservative and Labour voters is reassuringly small. In the

cases of the BBC and Channel 4 News, it is perhaps surprisingly small. The graphic shows that when asked how trustworthy do you rate the news reported by the following media organisations,

most Labour and Conservative voters tend to vote the same way. The biggest negative votes were from Labour voters for _The Sun_,_ The Daily Mail_, _The Express_, _The Telegraph_ and GB News.

The biggest negative votes from Conservative voters were for _The Guardian_, _Private Eye, The Mirror_ and _The New European_. No surprises here. More interesting, though again not

surprising, were the news organisations who were trusted almost equally by Conservative and Labour voters: the_ FT_, the BBC, Reuters, the_ Economist_, Sky, Channel 5, Times Radio, LBC, the_

Metro_ and _The Spectator_. _ _ And then there are the figures for those news organisations/outlets which are considered most and least trustworthy by both Left and Right. The least trusted

include the _Sun_, the_ Star _and the_ Mirror_. The most trusted include the_ FT_, the _Economist _and the traditional TV news organisations such as ITV and the BBC. What is really striking

though, is what happens if you compare these British figures with those of Democrat and Republican voters when asked which US news organisations they most trust. Suddenly the gap widens

spectacularly, whichever news outlet they are asked about, whether TV news, magazines or newspapers. A few are trusted by Democrats and Republicans alike: _Business Insider_, the_ National

Review_ and, astonishingly, the_ New York Post_. But, by and large, the gap is enormous when it comes to PBS, the BBC, AP, all the US TV news networks, the_ New York Times _and the_

Washington Post_, highbrow weekly magazines like the_ New Yorker_ and the_ Atlantic_, and, less surprisingly, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN. It would be interesting to see how these figures

compare with twenty years ago, when TV news, in particular, was less polarised, or even a few years ago before the _New York Times _and the_ Washington Post_ moved to the Left. An

interesting litmus test is the coverage of Israel, the three college presidents (MIT, UPenn and Harvard) or race in America since the Floyd affair, though this isn’t specified in

Burn-Murdoch’s infographic. In Britain, clearly Brexit has polarised opinion more than any other subject, hence the unpopularity of the _New European _among many Conservative voters. What is

also unclear is whether this polarisation will get worse in the future. The more Left-wing the BBC is seen by its critics, the more one might expect its trustworthiness among Conservative

voters to fall. But BBC News (and Channel 4 News) executives will be delighted by these polls. The last word should go to Burn-Murdoch who accompanied the graphic with a few tweets. The

first said, “It always blows my mind how much wider the partisan trust gap is for US media compared to the UK. Most British media is trusted (or distrusted about equally by supporters of

both major parties. That’s true of virtually no US media org. Deeply corrosive for US society.” He also wrote, “Total number of UK news orgs with positive net trust among both Labour and

Conservative supporters: 13. Total number of US news orgs with positive net trust among both Dems and Reps: 2 (_Wall Street Journal_ and _Forbes_).” This was followed by another tweet: “Then

you have the additional problem that no single US news source is consumed by more than 25% of Americans, whereas 60% of Brits regularly watch/read/listen to the BBC, Far harder for partisan

echo chambers to form in UK than US.” In this election year in both Britain and America, these figures about trust in the media and polarisation could be among the most interesting to

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