"This report reviews similarities and differences in public sector support for the media across a sample of six developed democracies – Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States – that represent a wide range of different media systems and different approaches to ...media policy. It shows that public support for the media in all of them has remained basically unchanged for decades: Primarily it takes the form of licence fee funding going overwhelmingly to public service broadcasting. This is the case in all the five European countries. In the United States, federal and state appropriations for public broadcasting constitute the second most significant form of public support for the media. Secondarily it takes the form of indirect support for paid print media industry incumbents. In the United States, this form of support is more significant than funding for public broadcasting. In all cases governments offer more indirect than direct support for private sector media organisations. Only Finland, France, and Italy offer direct subsidies; in Finland and France almost exclusively for the printed press, in Italy also to local broadcasters. In all three countries, indirect subsidies are more significant. There is no substantial public-sector support for online-only media organisations. In France, the only country in which such support was available, it amounted to little more than 1/10,000th of all public support in 2008." (Executive summary)
more
"Trust in the news has fallen in almost half the countries in our survey, and risen in just seven, partly reversing the gains made at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. On average, around four in ten of our total sample (42%) say they trust most news most of the time. Finland remains the countr...y with the highest levels of overall trust (69%), while news trust in the USA has fallen by a further three percentage points and remains the lowest (26%) in our survey.• Consumption of traditional media, such as TV and print, declined further in the last year in almost all markets (pre-Ukraine invasion), with online and social consumption not making up the gap. While the majority remain very engaged, others are turning away from the news media and in some cases disconnecting from news altogether. Interest in news has fallen sharply across markets, from 63% in 2017 to 51% in 2022.• Meanwhile, the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, has increased sharply across countries. This type of selective avoidance has doubled in both Brazil (54%) and the UK (46%) over the last five years, with many respondents saying news has a negative effect on their mood. A significant proportion of younger and less educated people say they avoid news because it can be hard to follow or understand – suggesting that the news media could do much more to simplify language and better explain or contextualise complex stories.• In the five countries we surveyed after the war in Ukraine had begun, we find that television news is relied on most heavily – with countries closest to the fighting, such as Germany and Poland, seeing the biggest increases in consumption. Selective news avoidance has, if anything, increased further – likely due to the difficult and depressing nature of the coverage.• Global concerns about false and misleading information remain stable this year, ranging from 72% in Kenya and Nigeria to just 32% in Germany and 31% in Austria. People say they have seen more false information about Coronavirus than about politics in most countries, but the situation is reversed in Turkey, Kenya, and the Philippines, amongst others." (Summary, p.10)
more