This economic motivation was expressly admitted in 2022 by the founder of the TNI, the BBC:
"Of course the members of the Trusted News Initiative are . . . rivals. . . . But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than . . . their commercial . . . rivalries. . . . [I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together. Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . . . . That’s the real competition now in the digital media world. Of course organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another."
