“It's the ideology, stupid!”: Trust in the press, ideological proximity between citizens and journalists and political parallelism. A comparative approach in 17 countries

Abstract

Matching national surveys with the dataset offered by the Worlds of Journalism Study network (2012–2016), this article presents an analysis of trust in the press covering 16 European countries and the United States. Drawing from the spatial proximity model of voter utility, this article focuses on the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ left-right positions as a determinant of trust in the press. We expect a positive relationship between these two variables. However, we also hypothesize that the strength of such relationship is mediated by the type of media model (according to Hallin and Mancini's classification) existing in the different countries. In particular, we expect a higher impact within those contexts where the level of political parallelism is higher. The statistical results are as expected. This article highlights that news media trust research should focus more thoroughly on the interaction and interrelation of news media, audience, and politics. The article brings also implications about the concept of political parallelism in journalism and how it is received by readers.

Opinion balance of news in the time of mistrust in media and democratic institutions

“…In its regular analysis of the media environment, the Reuters Institute of the Study of Journalism presented an overview of the use of sources for obtaining information in Slovakia for the years 2017 to 2023. It is clear from it that the use of any type of media to inform about current events has a decreasing tendency (Newman et al, 2023), which is probably also caused by the generally declining trust in traditional or mainstream media in several countries of the world (Hajdu et al, 2023;Curini et al, 2023;van der Linden et al, 2020, etc.). So, it is not a specific phenomenon typical only for our territory.…”