Where is the media most trusted?

A major international study has shown that among European countries, Finland has the highest level of trust in the media.

People are ambivalent about the information offered by the news media in different countries. Researchers at the Reuters Institute in their report “Digital News 2023” cite survey data from more than 93,000 people.

Overall, trust in news internationally is down 2% from the previous survey, but still four out of ten respondents generally trust most news. However, these are average figures, and behind the general international indicators there is a huge difference between individual countries.

As noted above, the highest level of trust in the media in Finland is 69%. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal have high rates. The report notes that countries with a “higher degree of political polarization” have lower levels of trust, such as Hungary and Greece. The latter endured a year “characterized by heated debates about press freedom and media independence.”

There are also differences between news outlets. In the UK, only a third of citizens, i.e. 33% of those surveyed said they trust most news most of the time. At the same time, 61% of respondents trust the BBC, and other large companies are not far behind.

In some countries, there is a significant decrease in the number of people who are interested in the news. This is partly due to political polarization, writes euronews. Moreover, people deliberately avoid the news. More than half of these are in Greece and Bulgaria (57%), in Poland – 44%, in the UK – 41%.

The share of people who answered that they are very or extremely interested in the news has decreased in France (from 59% to 36%, from 2015 to 2023) and in Spain (from 85% to 51%). Two anonymous respondents even said in the survey that they were forced to refuse news: “for the sake of their mental health,” as the first explained, and the second specifically avoids news about the economy, “because it is simply oppressive.”

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