Trust in the news

What percentage of Europeans trust the news?

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All around the world, we hear quite a bit of discontent with the news from people. I personally have also noticed, that some news media are more and more pushing a political viewpoint instead of neutrally reporting on the news. From my experience, it’s coming from both ends of the spectrum. However, I do notice that the severity seems to differ quite a bit by country.

To figure out how people really feel about the news in general, we can have a look at this map. We can see that the trust in the news varies very strongly across Europe. In most of north and western Europe, the majority of people trust the news. Finns trust the news the most (69%), followed by Portugal (61%) and Denmark (58%). Interestingly, the UK and France have a far lower trust in the news than the other north and western European countries. With 29%, France has one of the lowest rates in Europe.

In a lot of southern and eastern European countries, the trust in the news is below 40%. Slovakians have the lowest trust in the news, where only 26% of people trust the news. Greece and Hungary are right behind Slovakia with only 27%.

This data comes from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report.