Media Influence in the Platform Age: Intermediation, Trust and the Limits of Persuasion

Abstract

The question of whether media influence people - and how much - has been asked for a century without being settled, but the terms of the question have changed decisively. This article examines media influence in an environment in which the principal intermediaries between producers and audiences are platforms and, increasingly, generative systems rather than editors. It reports a comparative secondary analysis of the 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, the 2025 Eurobarometer on disinformation, and recent experimental and meta-analytic evidence on misinformation. Four findings emerge. First, access has been platformised: for the first time across forty-eight markets, social media and video networks (54 per cent) exceed news organisations' own websites and applications (51 per cent) as a weekly source of news. Second, intermediation and trust move in opposite directions - trust in news overall has fallen to 37 per cent, the lowest recorded, while trust in news encountered through social media (22 per cent) and AI chatbots (20 per cent) is lower still. Third, the experimental record does not support the strongest claims: deactivating a major misinformation vector in Brazil reduced recall of false rumours but did not change belief accuracy, polarisation or wellbeing, and following news on social media can increase knowledge and belief accuracy. Fourth, the mechanisms that demonstrably operate - attention, framing, repetition and perceived social norms - are cumulative and conditional rather than direct and uniform. The article argues that the analytically useful question is no longer how powerful media are but which intermediaries allocate attention, under what incentives, and with what distributional consequences.