In:
Publizistik, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, Vol. 66, No. 3-4 ( 2021-11), p. 463-487
Abstract:
Media trust has become a highly relevant topic in Communication Science in the past years. Trust in societal institutions, e.g., the media, is an important prerequisite for the functioning of democratic systems. The actual debate on the ‘lying press’ and ‘Fake News’ has intensified research on many different aspects of media trust. This encompasses (1) studies on the amount of media trust citizens have and on (2) different forms of media trust. Furthermore, (3) consequences of media trust have been investigated, e.g. how media trust shapes political judgements or perceptions, as well as (4) the media coverage on trust. Other researchers (5) put their focus on methodological aspects and try to improve the operationalization and the measurement of media trust. In addition, (6) factors which can influence media trust have been analyzed—amongst them recipients’ characteristics and media use, but, especially in international comparisons, media system factors, societal influence, a country’s economic performance or political conditions. The focus of our study is on the influence of recipient’s characteristics on media trust. Regarding some factors, as for example sociodemographic variables, their influence is still unclear because of very heterogenous findings. However, regarding other factors, as for example political attitudes, we already know that they seem to influence media trust—but in different studies, this influence is differently intensive. In our study, we want thus to find out which characteristics of recipients including their media use have a stable influence on media trust over time. Therefore, we use data from a long-term study on media trust: telephone surveys representative for the German population aged 18 and above in 2017, 2018 and 2019 with 1200 participants each. Besides media trust, we asked for different characteristics of respondents that can influence media trust: sociodemographic variables, media use, political attitudes, conspiracy beliefs and interpersonal trust. We use stepwise regression analysis in each year to find out which variables show a stable influence on media trust over time and which amount of media trust can be explained by different kinds of variables. The results show that all kinds of variables investigated—sociodemographic variables, media use, political attitudes, conspiracy beliefs and interpersonal trust—influenced media trust in the years 2017–2019. In the most complex models, 25% of the variance in media trust could be explained by these variables. Amongst the sociodemographic variables, age, formal education and gender showed an effect on media trust—older people, woman and those with a lower formal education had lower media trust. However, the influence of these variables disappeared partly in more complex regression models. Regarding media use, especially the use of public broadcasting TV and of so-called “alternative” news websites like Russia Today showed a stable effect on media trust—frequent users of public service broadcasting TV had higher, frequent users of alternative news websites lower media trust. The influence of some media types, e.g. newspapers or private TV, disappeared in more complex regression analysis. Political attitudes also were an important factor influencing media trust. Strongest was the effect of satisfaction with the democratic system—those whose satisfaction with our democratic system was high also had a higher media trust. Those whose political apathy was high showed lower levels of media trust. Furthermore, belief in conspiracy theories and interpersonal trust were related to media trust. Those who tended to believe conspiracy theories to be true had lower media trust—those with a high interpersonal trust had higher media trust. In an additional regression analysis, we analyzed in the data set of the year 2018 other variables which we only had explored in this year. The goal of this additional analysis was to show which kinds of variables also can help to explain media trust and on which variables future research could thus concentrate. The analysis showed that also citizen’s personal economic situation, alienation from the media, trust in other societal institutions (e.g., politics, justice) and the willingness for political participation were related to media trust, whereas knowledge about media had no effect on media trust. Overall, our analysis showed which characteristics of respondents showed a constant influence on media trust over time and whose influence was rather unstable. The effects we found were, due to our long-term study design, independent from the time of measurement, the actual mood in society or current discussions about single issues. We give thus genuine insights in an area where until now, research findings from surveys were rather inconsistent. Despite not analyzing panel data in our study and using a global measurement of media trust, we showed which factors influencing media trust future research could concentrate on and why long-term studies are highly relevant in this field.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0033-4006
,
1862-2569
DOI:
10.1007/s11616-021-00668-x
Language:
German
Publisher:
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Publication Date:
2021
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2273951-8
detail.hit.zdb_id:
209580-4
SSG:
1
SSG:
6,24
SSG:
3,5
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