“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.

Keywords

Ideological proximity media systems media trust political parallelism trust in press

Introduction

Despite the lack of a consensual definition, at its basic, news media trust entails the expectation that it is possible to rely on the information which the news media provide, even though it is not possible to control all the decisions and choices made in the news-making process (Van Dalen, 2020). In this respect, news media trust is determined by both the trustee (news media and journalists) and the trustor (audience/citizens) (see Fisher et al., 2021). As a result of that, it certainly depends on journalistic performances, but the evaluation of such performances remains relational and relative (see Carlson, 2017). As such, this study aims to overcome the traditional distinction marked by the institutional and cultural schools of thought in news media trust research, which link news media trust respectively to endogenous and exogenous factors (see Hanitzsch et al., 2018; Van Dalen, 2020); at the same time, this study also intends to go further the determinants that are usually employed in the literature to try to explain news media trust (see Fawzi et al., 2021).

Thus, drawing from the spatial proximity model of voter utility (Downs, 1957), this paper specifically focuses on the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ political leanings as a determinant of news media trust. Ideological proximity—here conceived as the degree of convergence between one's own political position and those expressed overall by journalists—precisely grasps the concept of news media trust in its interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors.

Considering that the interaction between news media and politics is related to both journalism production (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) and its public perception (Memoli and Splendore, 2014; Bozdağ and Koçer, 2022), this study also comparatively analyses whether the influence of ideological proximity is mediated by the type of media system existing in different contexts. In particular, we expect a higher impact of ideological proximity on trust in the news media in those countries where there is a stronger link between news media and politics (i.e., media systems where a higher level of political parallelism exists).

This study presents an analysis of trust in a specific media type, that is, the press, with an application to 17 countries. Coherently with our expectations, our empirical results show that our measure of ideological proximity (that we label PROXIMITY) has a substantial impact on trust in the press. However, this impact is significant only within those countries where news media and politics are traditionally intertwined.

This article contributes to putting some coherence in the hitherto fragmented literature on news media trust (see Engelke et al., 2019) by highlighting that news media trust research should focus more thoroughly on the interaction and interrelation of news media, audience, and politics. As we will discuss, this article brings also implications about the concept of political parallelism in journalism and how it is received by readers.

Media trust(s)

Due to its relevance, the issue of news media trust has been a recurring topic of interest in the literature throughout the years. However, the numerous studies on this topic reveal different and sometimes contradictory results which have led to debates that have not yet been concluded.

The richness and diversity of the results depend also on the granularity of the measurement used (Fawzi et al., 2021; Strömbäck et al., 2020). How news media trust at these different levels of analysis is related to each other remains unclear. In this regard, one important aspect of research on news media trust is related to the very concept of news media. In their thorough literature review, Fawzi et al. (2021) found that trust in specific media types often corresponds to more use of these media but the effects remain small and inconsistent; instead, when the focus is placed on trust in specific outlets or brands and media exposure to these, stronger associations emerge.

Our analysis deals with trust in a specific media type: the press. Trust in a particular media type has many more social implications than trust in a specific media organization because it shapes the audience's selection of news media (Tsfati and Ariely, 2014) and it has connections with trust in political institutions (Ariely, 2015; Hanitzsch et al., 2018), social connectedness (Zhang and Chia, 2006), and the perception of bias (Endersby and Ognianova, 1997). However, trust at this level of analysis has been ignored for many years. As Blöbaum (2014) points out: “Data on trust and media are most frequently related to (news) media in general. Less often different types of media like TV, or online become subject of surveys” (37). Our focus on the press might have seemed anachronistic, but the pivotal role of the press was—and in its legacy still is—evident for different reasons: 1) since it is the only medium exclusively providing information products (except for advertising), journalists play a prominent role as producers of information; 2) it is still considered one of the most representative and reputable sources of information (Newman et al., 2016; Vliegenthart et al., 2016); 3) it is still able to dictate the agenda regardless of the new modalities of articulation of the public sphere (i.e., Internet and social media; see Ceron et al., 2016).

That said, news media trust is a complex construct and, therefore, challenging to capture and predict; and this difficulty does not only concern the granularity of the measurement employed. Over the years, many researchers have investigated the multitude of factors that might account for differences in news media trust. Two schools of thought dominate the debate—the institutional and cultural ones—advancing respectively an institutional versus a cultural explanation of news media trust (Hanitzsch et al., 2018; Van Dalen, 2020). According to the institutional view, trust in public institutions is endogenous and, therefore, it is seen as a consequence of institutional performances: that is, positive performances should translate into higher levels of trust, while unsatisfactory performances decrease trust. In this line of thought, the erosion of news media trust is explained by the degrading performances of the news media. On the contrary, those who sustain the cultural explanation see news media trust as an exogenous factor that does not necessarily reflect institutional performances, but rather people’s cultural and social background.

From our perspective, these two schools of thought are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, we believe that news media trust involves both of such aspects (one endogenous to media and one exogenous). News media trust, we argue, depends on journalistic performance, on their fairness, honesty, and professionalism. However, as Carlson highlights in regard to journalistic authority (2017), performance evaluation—the possibility that people may or may not trust journalistic performances—is relational and relative. Accordingly, what really matters is the “perception” of overall journalists’ fairness and honesty in affecting a citizen's confidence in the media (see Nelson and Lewis, 2021). News media performances have surely an influence on these perceptions but they do not totally explain them; trust is more than individually rationalized assessments of performances (Moran, 2022). As we illustrate below, perceptions are due to both actual journalistic performances and ideological considerations.

Reconciling the institutional and the cultural school of thought in news media trust research means also going beyond the determinants that are usually employed in the literature to try to explain news media trust (see Fawzi et al., 2021). Thus, following Splendore and Curini (2020), as a focal determinant of news media trust we employ a relational measure that links a factor endogenous to news media (the ideological position of journalists) with an exogenous one (the ideological position of citizens) (see below).

Why (and under which conditions) ideological proximity matters

Our theoretical basis takes its starting point from the well-known spatial proximity model of voter utility (Downs, 1957), which predicts that voters derive the most (least) utility from the candidate or party closest to (farthest from) them on some ideological or policy continuum. This model is the cornerstone of voting behavior research (Adams et al., 2005) but it is easily extendable to any ego–alter relationship showing the same expected theoretical pattern: a decrease (increase) in the ideological proximity between ego and alter has negative (positive) consequences on ego in several different respects (Curini et al., 2015). This is what we do here, that is, understanding how (and under which conditions) ideological proximity between citizens and journalists matters in regard to citizens’ news media trust at the media type level. In this respect, we decided to focus on a specific linkage connecting journalists’ with citizens’ ideological positions as a determinant of trust in the press. More in detail, ideological proximity is here conceived as the degree of convergence between one's own political position and those expressed overall by journalists.

One criticism that can be made to this approach is that the emphasis on the ideological proximity between citizens and journalists is actually irrelevant to journalists’ honesty, fairness, etc., given that journalists in the aggregate could present a non-centrist ideological viewpoint without thereby implying a greater probability of any bias in their articles.¹ Nevertheless, what can be important, in terms of media trust, is the perception of citizens, i.e., not a real bias in journalists’ behavior but a perception of such bias based on ideological proximity (Yair and Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2015).

This expectation is coherent with several theoretical approaches. For example, in the process of political (mis)information consumption, homophily—that is, the extent to which a person perceives similarities between the way he thinks and another person does— is regarded as a major determinant of perceived source credibility (Swire et al., 2017). Specifically, individuals with a steady political position are more likely to perceive media coverage as biased against their beliefs (Vallone et al., 1985). Accordingly, when a citizen encounters views alien to his/her opinions, because they originate, for example, from a source “ideologically distant,” she can be motivated to maintain her pre-existing beliefs, while perceiving such messages as biased (and therefore untrustworthy). It is, for example, well-documented that the audiences of conservative talk radio in the United States tend to have more negative attitudes toward news media in general (see Fawzi et al., 2021). By contrast, whenever journalists’ positions appear to be closer to citizens, trust in news media increases. Indeed, like-minded information typically leads to positive source appraisal (Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2005). Not surprisingly in this respect, journalists’ ideological positions are considered among the main factors correlated with self-reported perception of media bias (ibid.). This mechanism is mainly explained by partisanship (Arpan and Raney, 2003).

The impact of partisanship among journalists has already been considered a possible determinant of news media trust, although a precise link between journalists’ political beliefs and actual news coverage has not been convincingly established (Lee, 2005). Recent changes in the news media environment have made the focus on ideological proximity between citizens and journalists increasingly relevant in terms of news media trust. We assume that the individual level (see Shoemaker and Reese, 1996) has been increasingly influential in shaping news content. In the Hierarchy of Influences Model (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996), the individual level—that is, the personal traits of newsworkers—is surely important in shaping news content but it is obviously more important when journalists also create their own content via personal channels. Since journalists have an increasing number of channels to present themselves, their views, and work (Reese and Shoemaker, 2016), their public role goes much further beyond the single news product; they have personal (and new) channels through which they can express their ideas and opinions. Barberà et al. (2016), for example, define journalists’ uses of social media both as personalization and editorialization. Although the blurring of the boundaries between journalistic public and private communication is not a new phenomenon related to social media (Steensen, 2016), such platforms escalate it by pushing journalists toward even greater transparency (Hedman and Djerf-Pierre, 2013). The consequence of blurred boundaries is that journalism becomes “dominated by a discourse of intimacy, in which personal opinions and self-disclosures are key characteristics” (Steensen, 2016: 114). The increased prominence of the individual level implies that citizens (both those citizens who usually read newspapers, as well as those who don’t) are more aware of the journalists’ ideological positions from the content journalists produce. Also, starting from journalists’ produced content, the disclosed journalists’ political orientations could become part of the common knowledge about journalism (see Nielsen, 2016), thus extending also to whom have no contact with (some) journalists.

So, we assume that citizens have clear(er) knowledge about journalists’ main ideological positions and that this becomes a crucial issue in affecting their overall attitude toward news media in terms of trust. All this considered, we hypothesize that:

The more (less) the ideological proximity between a citizen and journalists, the higher (lower) the trust in the press reported by the former (H1).

We however also assume that the impact of ideological proximity is going to be mediated by the overall media context in which the relationship between journalists and citizens takes place. In this sense, the value of comparative research in journalism study clearly goes beyond the mere comparison of countries; it helps to contextualize journalism, its structures and actors, and its normative premises in society (Gurevitch and Blumler, 2004). Comparative studies have demonstrated that journalism is highly dependent on the cultural, social, political, and historical contexts within which it operates (Hanitzsch, 2020)—and so the relationship with the audience is. Indeed, comparative research has been found to be necessary to compare features of the journalism-audience relationship in different countries and media systems (ibid.).

Despite comparative analyses in social sciences having a long-established tradition (see Smelser, 1976), in journalism studies they have been underdeveloped until relatively recently (Blumler et al., 1992). Only in the last two decades, there has been a progressive advance with an ever-growing body of scholarship devoted to identifying commonalities and differences across a growing number of countries (Hanusch and Vos, 2020).

In particular, the renowned work by Hallin and Mancini (2004) has arguably inspired or formed a theoretical backdrop for much of the work in the field; they offer a framework well-suited for comparative analyses that aim at the understanding of the interplay between media and politics, as in our case. Indeed, following this seminal work, the study of media systems has become a cornerstone in the evolving field of comparative communication research: “typologies of media systems can serve as powerful heuristics that guide concept formation, hypotheses, and case selection” (Brüggemann et al., 2014: 1037).

Hallin and Mancini identified four major dimensions according to which media systems in Western Europe and North America can be usefully compared: (1) Newspaper Industry; (2) Political Parallelism; (3) Professionalization; and (4) Role of the State in the Media Systems. With these four factors in mind, Hallin and Mancini distinguished between three models of media systems: the Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model, the Northern European or Democratic Corporatist Model, and the North Atlantic or Liberal Model.

Although Hallin and Mancini's models have been criticized and revised (Brüggemann et al., 2014; Humprecht et al., 2022), they maintain a heuristic value for interpreting the different journalistic cultures, especially those we detect here, considering that the digitization processes have led to changes in the values and perceptions of the profession only later. Also, while Hallin and Mancini's general projection was about the global convergence of media systems due to the Americanization of mass media all over the world, this proved to be an illusion already several years ago (see Bene, 2020; Hotchkiss, 2010; Waisbord, 2013). In this vein, the classification of Hallin and Mancini has been extended beyond the boundaries of Western countries including frequently Eastern European ones (see Hallin and Mancini, 2011, 2012; Humprecht et al., 2022). This may be explained by the fact that those are the countries to which the theoretical framework is most easily transferable (Hallin and Mancini, 2012).

As we investigate the varying degrees of influence that ideological proximity exerts on media trust within different media systems, it is the dimension relating to “political parallelism” that is of greatest interest to this article. Political parallelism can be explained as “the extent to which the different media reflect distinct political orientations in their news and current affairs reporting, and sometimes also their entertainment content” (Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 28). It extends the concept of party-press parallelism that describes the links between media outlets and political parties (Seymour-Ure, 1974) to include general political values and being close to certain political camps rather than to specific parties (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Common components of political parallelism are: 1) organizational connections between news media and political parties or other kinds of organizations that are often linked to political parties; 2) the tendency for news media personnel to be active in political life; and 3) the tendency toward commentary and partisan journalism.

Political parallelism might have, therefore, a mediating effect on the relationship between ideological proximity and trust in the press. Indeed, the variance of the expressed ideological positions of journalists is presumably higher where there is a closer link between news media and politics and lower where more impartial and detached journalism is offered. As stated by Hallin and Mancini (2004): “Political parallelism is also often manifested in the partisanship of media audiences, with supporters of different parties or tendencies buying different newspapers or watching different TV channels” (28). So, in a situation of a high level of political parallelism, it is not only reasonable to assume that the salience played by ideology in affecting the trust in the press is more pronounced. We should also expect a higher chance for some overlap between citizens’ ideological positions and the ideological position of at least some journalists. Similarly, within this same media context, where this overlap does not materialize (say, e.g., in a country where a leftist pool of journalists is facing a conservative audience), it is easy to imagine the development of a hostile media perception (Gunther and Schmitt, 2004; Vallone et al., 1985). In both cases, the impact of ideological proximity on trust in the press should be magnified. From here, our second hypothesis:

The positive relationship between ideological proximity and trust in the press is mediated by the existing type of media model existing. In particular, a higher impact of ideological proximity on trust in the press is expected in those countries where there is a stronger connection between media and politics (i.e., a higher level of political parallelism) (H2).

Method

Data

To test our hypotheses, we rely on three different datasets. The survey employed to calculate journalists’ ideological positions come from a collaborative effort conducted by the Worlds of Journalism Study network (WJS)² between 2012 and 2016. This dataset has been released in 2020 and, at the moment, represents the more recent and comprehensive effort to capture, among many other things, journalists’ political leanings around the world. The network investigated the state of journalism and the professional views of journalists in 67 countries, following the research design adopted in a pilot study (2007–2011) conducted in 21 countries. The WJS network focused on studying professional journalists, broadly defined as those who have at least some editorial responsibility for the content they produce. To qualify as a “journalist,” individuals had to earn at least 50 percent of their income from paid labor for news media. In addition, they had to either be involved in producing or editing journalistic content or be in an editorial supervision and coordination position. Only media organizations that have their own news program or news section were considered “news media”. The contextual realities in participating countries required that the general methodological framework allows for several methods of data collection as well as sampling procedure. However, all research teams constructed national samples of news media that reflect the structure of their country's media system. WJS provides therefore representative samples of national populations of journalists, whose size inevitably varies across countries (for further details, see Lauerer and Hanitzsch, 2019).

The second and third datasets we rely on for this analysis come from the Eurobarometer survey number 82.3 (November 2014) and WVS 2010–2014 for the USA (2011). Eurobarometer survey number 82.3 addresses a representative sample of the citizens residing in the 28 countries of the European Union after the 2013 enlargement. A multistage, random (probability) sampling design was used for this Eurobarometer. The regular sample size (in the sense of completed interviews) is 1000 respondents per country. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in people’s homes in the respective national language (for further details, see European Commission, 2018). As far as WVS 2010–2014 is concerned, the US survey was conducted online in 2011 in both English and Spanish and the sample size is 2232. Panel members were recruited through national random samples almost entirely by postal mail (for further details, see Inglehart et al., 2014).

Those latter datasets were selected because they include questions related to the citizens’ ideological positions as well as their trust in the press, while also roughly matching the time period of the above discussed WJS survey.

The selection of the countries to be analyzed was made both on the basis of the available data and the possibility to carry out a meaningful comparison according to our research framework. Considering the comparative aim to investigate the mediating effect of political parallelism in the relationship between ideological proximity and trust in the press, 16 European countries and the US has been selected to satisfactorily cover the various models of media systems identified by Hallin and Mancini (2004) and the following extensions. These countries provide the right balance between similarities and differences necessary for a fruitful comparison (see Sartori, 1991). According to Hallin and Mancini (2012), extending their typology beyond the European and English-speaking North American countries (aside from Australia and New Zealand) may require significant modifications of the conceptual framework (see also Rodny-Gumede, 2020; Shaw, 2009).

Despite they are not new, the advantage of our datasets is that they allow us to detect the possible impact of ideological proximity at a time when it was less confrontational to identify journalism and journalists. Nowadays, it has become more difficult and less reasonable to design research that meaningfully separates institutional journalism from the broader digital flow of information (see Deuze and Witschge, 2018; Reese, 2022; Zelizer et al., 2021). Results from Daniller et al. (2017) are paradigmatic in showing how the proliferation of news media sources in the contemporary media environment has increased the accessibility bias in the kind of news media that most easily comes to people’s minds when answering questions about trust.

The years in which interviews with both journalists (2012–2016) and citizens (2014) were collected are instead those in which categories now dominant in the world of information have not fully developed, notwithstanding the large possibility of communication between citizens and journalists having already made ideological proximity salient. Those data give us, therefore, some indispensable tools to build a deeper knowledge of the relationship between closely intertwined—but still meaningfully separable—factors such as news media, audience, and politics. There we can find the seeds that might shed further light on the increased concerns about fragmentation, polarization, and relativism in the contemporary media environment (see Van Aelst et al., 2017).

Measures

Starting from those datasets, our most crucial independent variable, that is, ideological proximity, has been built. The question about ideological position administered in the three surveys employed was the following one, with only slight variations among them: “In political matters, people talk of “the left,” “the right,” and the “center.” On a scale where 0 is left, 10 is right, and 5 is center, where would you place yourself?.”

Despite there are several ways to conceptualize and measure the proximity between two items, we focus on a “many-to-one” proximity between the full set of citizens’ left-right ideological positions and a summary of ideological positions with respect to journalists. More in detail, we built our measure of ideological proximity (that we label PROXIMITY) as follows: $PROXIMIT Y_{i} = - | x_{i} - \bar{J} |,$ where x_i is the ideological position of respondent i along with the left-right spectrum according to Eurobarometer survey number 82.3 (WVS for the USA–WVS 2010–2012), while $\bar{J}$ is the average position of national journalists on the same spectrum according to the Worlds of Journalism Study survey. The higher the value of PROXIMITY, the more the ideological position of a citizen is placed near to that of the corresponding average journalists’ position. PROXIMITY is, therefore, a relational measure that links, with respect to trust toward the press, an endogenous aspect (the ideological position of journalists) with an exogenous one (the ideological position of citizens). Overall, the mean of PROXIMITY is −1.82, standard deviation 1.50.

Figure 1 highlights the relationship between the average left-right self-ideological placement of journalists in each country and the average of PROXIMITY in the same country. If we assume, as it is usually the case, that the mass of citizens is traditionally clustered around the ideological center of the space in most democracies, then a “balanced” ideological distribution of journalists could ceteris paribus positively affect the value of PROXIMITY. And in fact, the lowest values of PROXIMITY are in those countries where the average position of journalists is to the left (as in Italy or Spain) or to the right (as in the Czech Republic) along with the ideological spectrum. From here, the quadratic relationship between the two variables is reported in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Relationship between the average left-right self-ideological placement of journalists and the average of PROXIMITY at the country-level.

The dependent variable in our analysis is represented by the answers given by citizens to a question related to trust in the press codified as a dummy, where 0 = tend not to trust and 1 = tend to trust. This variable shows a mean of .453, standard deviation 498. As can be seen from Figure 2, it arises a large variance across countries worth to be analyzed.

Figure 2.

Distribution of trust in the press at the country-level.

To test H2, we have then assigned each country included in our database to a specific media system according to the typology outlined by Hallin and Mancini (2004) and his following extensions (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Distribution of countries in the different media systems.

Country	Media system
Sweden	Corporatist model
Denmark
The Netherlands
Belgium
Germany
Austria
Iceland
Italy	Mediterranean model
Greece
Spain
Portugal
United Kingdom	Liberal model
Ireland
USA
Hungary	East European model
Estonia
Czech Republic

Two of the media systems considered in the analysis show a high level of political parallelism—the Mediterranean and Democratic Corporatist models—and the other two a low level—the Liberal and East European models. For the first three models listed, this consideration has been based on the abovementioned work by Hallin and Mancini (2004).³ As far as the Eastern European countries reference is concerned, it has been based on the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication's entry on “Political Parallelism,” in which De Albuquerque (2018) points out that “transnational and global structures and dynamics undermine political parallelism, because a basic (but often unspoken) requisite allowing it to exist is the spatial correspondence between the political and media institutions under analysis” (24); so, the transnationalization of news media definitely challenge political parallelism. Among the various cases presented, the author highlights the control of a substantial part of the Eastern European countries’ media by transnational media groups, mainly from Western and Northern Europe. This has led us to consider the media system of the Eastern European countries included in our database as characterized by a low level of political parallelism at the time of the surveys here considered.⁴

Results

Table 2 reports the results of the first set of logistical regression models estimated that regard only micro (individual-level) variables and that focus on H1. In Model 1, beyond PROXIMITY, we checked for socioeconomic variables (Gender: 1 to man; 2 to woman; Age: a variable recorded over 6 categories; Social Class: a variable that equals to 1 for lower middle class, 2 for middle class, and 3 for upper middle class). In Model 2, we also added a further set of attitudinal variables commonly employed in the literature. Following Tsfati and Ariely (2014), we have added a variable related to the political interest of citizens (Political Interest: the higher the value of such variable, the lower the political interest and involvement in political discussions). Since also political leaning is usually regarded as important for media trust (see Fawzi et al., 2021), we included a variable that records the left-right position of the respondents on an 11-point scale (0 = left; 10 = right). Studies conducted mainly in the U.S. suggest that right-wing citizens tend to show a lower level of news media trust and more intense hostile media perception compared to left-wing supporters (ibid.). Thus, introducing a citizen's ideology into the analysis potentially controls for her prior beliefs regarding the existence and extent of political bias in the press. Note that this estimated model (and also the following ones) does not present any problem of collinearity, despite the theoretical relationship between PROXIMITY and ideological self-placement. Also, since trust in the news media is caught in a trust nexus with political institutions (Ariely, 2015; Hanitzsch et al., 2018), through a dummy variable we control for the level of trust in political parties (Trusting parties: 0 = no; 1 = yes).

Table 2.

Individual-level factors affecting trust in press.

	Model 1 (Random Model)	Model 2 (Random Model)	Model 3 (Logit with country fixed effects)
PROXIMITY	0.074***	0.079***	0.079***
	(0.012)	(0.013)	(0.013)
Gender(1 = Man;2 = Woman)	−0.087*	−0.078*	−0.079*
	(0.034)	(0.036)	(0.036)
Age	−0.035**	−0.044***	−0.044***
	(0.011)	(0.011)	(0.011)
Social class (1 = lower;2 = middle;3 = upper)	0.277***	0.227***	0.227***
	(0.028)	(0.030)	(0.030)
Left-right ideological self-location		−0.010	−0.009
		(0.008)	(0.008)
Political Interest (from 1 = Strong to 4 = Not at all)		−0.090***	−0.090***
		(0.021)	(0.021)
Trusting parties (0 = no; 1 = yes)		1.357***	1.358***
		(0.049)	(0.049)
Constant	−0.111	−0.020	−0.144
	(0.162)	(0.176)	(0.130)
Observations	15145	14589	14589
Number of countries	17	17	17
AIC	19569.505	18010.870	18069.042
BIC	−9755.876	−8962.289	−8919.465
Log Likelihood	19523.753	17942.578	17886.930
ICC	0.088	0.089	-
Country fixed-effects	No	No	Yes

Standard errors in parentheses.

⁺

p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

Note that our observations are nested into countries, therefore, to avoid the risk of having errors not independent among each other (an outcome that all likelihood-ratio tests clearly confirm in our database), we ran a set of random (hierarchical) models. Using a logistic model with country-fixed effects (see Model 3 in Table 2) does not affect our results. We stick to the random models because otherwise we couldn’t check for the mediating impact of contextual variables (and therefore for H2).

As can be seen, regardless of the set of control variables included in the analysis, PROXIMITY is always significant and with the expected positive sign. The coefficient moreover is rather stable across models and far from being negligible. An increase of PROXIMITY from the first to the third quartile of its distribution in our database (i.e., from −2.76 to −.55) produces an increase in trust in the press of 5% (from .46 to .51—holding all other variables at their mean) according, for example, to Model 2 estimates. This clearly provides a strong empirical corroboration for H1.

It is moreover interesting the fact that PROXIMITY is significant although ideological self-placement is controlled for, while this latter variable fails to be significant. This may suggest that citizens’ trust in media is more affected by the ideological proximity separating them from journalists rather than by any ideological position of citizens per se.

Among the control variables, it is also remarkable that age appears always significant and with a negative sign. This seems to contradict some existing research which shows that younger people tend to consider television and online news more credible, whereas older adults express higher levels of trust in newspapers; although the literature is overall inconsistent (see Fawzi et al., 2021). Fawzi (2019), for example, found that older people put less trust in tabloids. Also, as far as gender is concerned the literature is inconsistent (see Fawzi et al., 2021): in this respect, our results show that women place lower trust in the press. On the contrary, and strongly in line with previous research, social class, interest in politics, and trust in political institutions—political parties in our case—are positively associated with trust in the press (Fawzi et al., 2021; Hanitzsch et al., 2018): that is, trust in the press increases as the political interest, the political trust, and the social class of the respondent also increase.

As discussed above, we expect, however, the impact of PROXIMITY to be mediated by contextual factors, in particular the type of media system existing in the different countries. As a result, in Table 3 to properly test H2, we added a set of interactions involving PROXIMITY and, respectively, the dummies identifying the Mediterranean, Corporatist, and East European models (while keeping the Liberal model as our omitted category). We moreover controlled for the impact of other different macro-(country-)level variables such as the percentage of the population using the Internet in the year of the surveys we employed in our database (Source: the World Bank), the percentual of people with secondary education in each country (Source: United Nations Development Programme) as well as the index of Press Freedom (Source: Freedom House data 2014).⁵

Table 3.

Individual and contextual-level factors affecting trust in press.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
PROXIMITY	0.028	0.028	0.028	0.029
	(0.027)	(0.027)	(0.027)	(0.027)
Liberal Model	Reference category	Reference category	Reference category	Reference category
East European Model	1.159***	1.193***	1.389***	1.311***
	(0.328)	(0.332)	(0.290)	(0.196)
Proximity * East European Model	0.029	0.029	0.029	0.027
	(0.040)	(0.040)	(0.040)	(0.040)
Mediterranean Model	1.281***	1.399***	0.483	1.737***
	(0.306)	(0.379)	(0.391)	(0.195)
Proximity * Mediterranean Model	0.088*	0.088*	0.088*	0.087*
	(0.038)	(0.038)	(0.038)	(0.038)
Corporativist Model	1.135***	1.079***	1.134***	0.851***
	(0.275)	(0.294)	(0.232)	(0.168)
Proximity * Corporativist Model	0.070*	0.071*	0.071*	0.072*
	(0.033)	(0.033)	(0.033)	(0.033)
Left-right ideological self-location	−0.008	−0.008	−0.008	−0.007
	(0.008)	(0.008)	(0.008)	(0.008)
Political Interest (from 1 = Strong to 4 = Not at all)	−0.084***	−0.084***	−0.085***	−0.086***
	(0.021)	(0.021)	(0.021)	(0.021)
Trusting Parties (0 = no; 1 = yes)	1.355***	1.355***	1.355***	1.353***
	(0.049)	(0.049)	(0.049)	(0.049)
Gender(1 = Man;2 = Woman)	−0.079*	−0.079*	−0.079*	−0.079*
	(0.036)	(0.036)	(0.036)	(0.036)
Age	−0.045***	−0.045***	−0.045***	−0.046***
	(0.011)	(0.011)	(0.011)	(0.011)
Social class (1 = lower;2 = middle;3 = upper)	0.226***	0.227***	0.227***	0.223***
	(0.030)	(0.030)	(0.030)	(0.030)
% population using Internet		0.008
		(0.015)
% PPL with secondary education			−0.029**
			(0.011)
Press freedom				−0.044***
				(0.007)
Constant	−0.997***	−1.646	1.674⁺	−0.057
	(0.253)	(1.269)	(1.008)	(0.232)
Observations	14589	14589	14589	14589
Number of countries	17	17	17	17
AIC	17934.795	17936.525	17930.642	17916.964
BIC	18048.615	18057.933	18052.051	18038.372
Log Likelihood	−8952.397	−8952.262	−8949.321	−8942.482
ICC	0.043	0.042	0.030	0.013

Standard errors in parentheses.

⁺

p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

Figure 3 illustrates the marginal impact of PROXIMITY on trust in the press through the different regional variables while holding all the other variables of model 1 of Table 3 at their mean level. As expected according to H2, the results show that the marginal impact of PROXIMITY is significant and with the expected positive sign only within Mediterranean and Corporatist countries, not within East European countries and, most notably, Liberal countries.

Figure 3.

Marginal impact of PROXIMITY according to media system type.

It should also be noted that there is a (slight) indirect impact of PROXIMITY as well. In the Mediterranean, Corporatist, and East European countries, there is indeed a significantly higher trust in the press than in Liberal countries; moreover, this difference, at least in the former two sets of countries, magnifies as PROXIMITY increases as well (see Figure 4 below). This can be read as further evidence in support of H2.

Figure 4.

Marginal impact of media system type (Mediterranean/Corporatist) throughout PROXIMITY values.

Regarding country-level control variables, it is interesting that PROXIMITY retains a significant impact within countries with a high level of political parallelism although the percentage of people using the Internet is controlled for, while this latter variable fails to be significant. This may suggest that the link between PROXIMITY and trust in the press also significantly existed in the past independently of digital technologies: such technologies might have only made it more salient due to the amount of information available. Another, but not exclusive, possible explanation is that with the flourishing of the Internet and social media over the years, what happens in these environments could have been considered more newsworthy (as outlined by Broersma and Graham, 2013). So, it is possible that the opinions and positions expressed by journalists through their personal online channels can also be made public in the mainstream news media,⁶ thus explaining the presence of the effect of PROXIMITY after controlling for the percentage of people using the Internet.

Intriguing enough, countries with a higher percentage of people with secondary education and countries with higher levels of press freedom show lower trust in the press. The former result is in line with previous research that links higher education with lower news media trust and higher media cynicism (see Fawzi et al., 2021) while, in accordance with the latter, Müller (2013) found an inverted relationship between press freedom and press trust arguing that a fully commercialized media system may be detrimental to news media trust.

Conclusion

Given the well-known academic and societal relevance of news media trust, this article has presented a new approach to studying news media trust at the media-type level. Our proposal includes an application to 17 countries belonging to different media systems according to the typology elaborated by Hallin and Mancini (2004) and his following extensions.

This analysis started from our dissatisfaction both with the determinants that are usually employed to try to explain news media trust and with the unconnectedness between the institutional and cultural schools of thought. So, we introduced as an antecedent of trust in the press a variable that captures the ideological proximity between journalists and citizens; a variable that we assume has great(er) relevance since journalists have new (and personal) channels through which they can express their ideas and opinions and, therefore, citizens can a have clear(er) knowledge about journalists’ main ideological positions from the content they produce. Our computed variable PROXIMITY grasps in particular the concept of trust in the press in its interplay between a factor endogenous to news media (the ideological position of journalists) with an exogenous one (the ideological position of citizens).

Results show that, as hypothesized, the overall effect of PROXIMITY on trust in the press complements traditional attributes employed in the literature while remaining robust to control for the self-ideological placement of the respondents, among others. However, they also show that the relationship between ideological proximity and trust in the press is mediated by the type of media model existing in the different countries considered. In particular, a higher impact of PROXIMITY on trust in the press is found in those countries where there is a higher level of political parallelism.

The application to a pool of countries with different levels of political parallelism furnishes a further item of evidence on the broader consequences of the ideological position of journalists, especially when that position does not match that of citizens and the political parallelism in the country is high. In this respect, our conclusion is not in contradiction with the literature dealing with the hostile media perception, which shows that people perceive even neutral and even-handed media as hostile to their position, especially when media and politics are strictly enmeshed (Gunther and Schmitt, 2004; Vallone et al., 1985). On the contrary, our analysis offers a potential explanation, based on ideological proximity, of when and why this could happen, rather than the simple self-ideological position.

These results are also evidence in support of the fact that news media trust should not be solely considered as a product of journalism or as an intrinsic feature traceable to certain individual characteristics but as an ecosystemic resource resulting from the interaction and interrelation of news media, audience, and politics. This perspective allows us to better systematize the dynamic network of interactions and expectations that have always underpinned news production and consumption; keeping also in mind the social, cultural, technological, and political structures of the existing news media environment (Anderson, 2013). Relationships among those factors set the context for any given actor and organization; changes in the ecosystem mean also a change in the contexts where news is produced and consumed, and consequently changing expectations and interactions between news producers and users (Anderson et al., 2014).

As stated in the Method section, the results here presented from a different media system in comparison to today’s media ecology should be read as a snapshot that might help to further understand the contemporary news media environment. The fact that citizens and users are more likely to trust in closer ideological media might explain some of the current concerns outlined by Van Aelst et al. (2017): that is, the increased fragmentation and polarization of news media content and use, and the increased relativism toward facts.

Concerning fragmentation and polarization, the ever-increasing supply of information has created more opportunity structures for selective exposure based on political attitudes and beliefs either because the supply matches demand for niche or partisan media or because the supply creates a greater demand for media tailored to people's political beliefs (Van Aelst et al., 2017). The high-choice media environment has empowered political and other strategic actors who can now autonomously communicate with the public. Some of those sources, especially those that embrace a populist stance, try also to systematically delegitimize journalism (see Carlson et al., 2021). Mullainathan and Shleifer (2005) argue that “competition forces newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their readers, and greater competition typically results in more aggressive catering to such prejudice as competitors strive to divide the market” (1042). In this respect, Curini (2022) found that the competition exacerbated by the multiplication of information channels has brought newspapers to slant the content of the news they produce; their main objective has been to cater to the prejudices of their regular readers. At the same time, the users are able and willing to look at the closest news content and news providers (see Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). Despite empirical results not always support far-reaching claims about the increased fragmentation and polarization of news media content and use, concerns are well-founded (Van Aelst et al., 2017).

Regarding relativism, public demand for “facts” that align with own political beliefs either is increasing or it has become easier for people to match their demand with the supply of biased information. In the contemporary high-choice media environment, a situation characterized by multiple, sometimes very distant, epistemic communities engaged in defining alternative forms of knowledge has emerged (Van Aelst et al., 2017). Thus, the epistemic status of information has increasingly become an issue of public debate up to the point where factual information is often downgraded to mere (ideological) opinion (see also Waisbord, 2018). In this respect, Valeriani et al. (2021) show that higher levels of reliance on institutional actors’ statements about the pandemic correspond to greater trust in vaccines against the Coronavirus. Therefore, the authors suggest that people's understanding of the Coronavirus depends on the information they have acquired as well as on the worldview they adhere to. Also, Egelhofer and Lecheler (2019) explore how “fake news” has been used as a way for political actors to label those sources of information that support ideological positions that are far from their own. Thus, the “fake news label” is not applied to critically evaluate the coverage of a medium but rather to delegitimize it a priori. In this vein, communicative untruthfulness encompasses not only the actual spread of incorrect information but also its discursive construction (Hameleers and Minihold, 2022). Egelhofer et al. (2022) found that disinformation accusations affect audience's trust in the targeted news media, while trust in the accusing actors remains largely unaffected. Also, people with strong populist attitudes generalize these accusations to the news media as a whole and, therefore, they have been found to decrease their general news media trust.

Taken together, these two concerns highlighted by Van Aelst et al. (2017) point out that the transformation into a high-choice information environment “means that people's preferences have become more decisive for what media they use and how they process the information stemming from these sources” (Strömbäck et al., 2022: 59—italics in the original). By shedding more light on the mechanisms underlying (ideologically-driven) trust in the press at a time when a distinction between institutional information and the broader digital flow of information could still be made, our findings form a basis to understand contemporary phenomena that are taking place in a media environment in which analyses of this kind are becoming increasingly difficult to pursue.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Diego Garusi

Notes

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