Can Trust in Traditional News Media Explain Cross-National Differences in News Exposure of Young People Online?

Abstract

Using data from a cross-national survey (N = 940) and from in-depth interviews with 37 students in Israel, Norway and the United Kingdom, we discuss how in different political and news media environments young people’s trust in traditional media can explain their news exposure online. This study shows there are some similarities, but also major cross-national differences, between young people in how they trust, are exposed to and find different news sources usable for information about their society. Students from all these countries have higher trust in traditional news media than in social media. However, young people in Norway living in high-trust environments tend to be exposed to a wider variety of news sources than the UK and Israeli students. They also tend to be more skeptical about social media as a useful source of information. Furthermore, this study suggests that in a national context of conflict and low trust in media, such as Israel, distrust in traditional news media can explain foreign news exposure online. However, the effect of trust in national media is not significant in the Norwegian and the UK sample, which highlights the importance of discussing online news exposure in different national political and media environments.

keywords:

• comparative
• mixed method
• online news exposure
• trust in media
• young adults

Notes

1. Thurman (2014) finds that the online channels of the UK national newspapers have increased their daily overseas audience between 7 and 16 times. Even though these online readers’ visits are relatively brief, this finding indicates that (at least outside the United Kingdom) more audiences are searching for news from foreign news organizations than before.

2. This may be linked to the fact that British citizens tend to read many more tabloid newspapers than citizens in the other European countries (Aarts, Fladmoe, and Strömbäck 2012, 114).

3. In 1995, there were 168 communities in Norway with at least one “paid-for” newspaper, and a total of 218 newspapers published. In 2012, there were 227 “paid-for” newspapers published in 185 locales (Høst 2014).

4. Among those between 16 and 24 years, 90 percent were on Facebook on an average day (Vaage 2015).

5. Twenty-four percent had used a Twitter account and half had done so for the purpose of finding news (Newman and Levy 2014).

6. Interviews were tape-recorded and the tapes were deleted after finishing the transcriptions of the interviews.

7. Correlations between 0.388 and 0.769, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.87.

8. Pearson r correlations between 0.390 and 0.613, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.78.