Germans' trust in the media fell slightly last year, but is still at a higher level than before the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. This is the result of the long-term study that the Universities of Mainz and Düsseldorf began in 2015. The results for 2022 are based on a representative telephone survey of 1200 citizens in December.

Sascha Zoske

Newspaper editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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49 percent of respondents completely or somewhat agreed with the statement that the media can be trusted when it comes to really important things such as environmental problems, health hazards or political crises. At the end of the Corona year 2020, 56 percent had shared this view, compared to between 41 and 44 percent in previous years.

National newspapers in third place

The public broadcasters appeared to be the most credible: 62 percent of the survey participants said they trusted them. However, this shows a significant decrease compared to 2020 (70 percent), and it is the lowest level determined so far in the study. Local and regional newspapers came in second place (60 percent), followed by national newspapers (55 percent). Social networks (five percent) and tabloids (four percent) are far behind.

Only 17 percent were of the opinion that the media could not be trusted or could not be trusted at all. 14 percent even believed that the German population was systematically lied to by the media; in 2020, this proportion was eleven percent – this gap is still within the statistical margin of error. At 21 percent, however, there was a relatively high level of approval for the thesis that the media work hand in hand with politicians to manipulate the population. In 2020, the figure was 15 percent, and in the years before the pandemic it was between 20 and 27 percent.

The reporting of the established media on the pandemic was assessed more critically than during the corona crisis. The proportion of those who considered them credible fell from 63 percent in 2020 to 43 percent last year. Confidence in reports on the Ukraine war (45 percent) and climate change (46 percent) is at a similar level.