Mainz long-term study in media trust

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The Mainz long-term study media trust investigates the causes, developments and consequences of trust in public communication in Germany. It is based on annual representative surveys of the German population. The study has been carried out annually with mostly 1200 telephone interviews since 2015 .

aims

The Mainz long-term study aims at permanent trust monitoring for Germany. To explain the developments in media trust, communication and political science , sociological and psychological theories are integrated on the micro (individual), meso (institutions) and macro (society) level.

In addition to current snapshots, the central goals of the study are the state of trust in the media and other institutions, and in particular research into long-term developments. Another goal is the development of explanatory models and causal analyzes for the emergence of trust and mistrust as well as especially skepticism and cynicism in public communication, which differentiate between different types of media.

execution

A pilot study at the Institute for Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz surveyed the media trust of Germans in the cross-section of the population for the first time. The Mainz long-term study media trust was developed by the communication scientists Nikolaus Jackob , Oliver Quiring , Christian Schemer from the Institute for Journalism at the University of Mainz and Marc Ziegele from the Institute for Social Sciences at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf as well as the journalism researcher Tanjev Schultz from the Journalism Seminar at the University of Mainz. Communication scientist Ilka Jakobs has been a member of the project group since the end of 2018.

The research project is funded both by the research initiative of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate and by the Media Convergence Research Center of the University of Mainz.

Relevance and reception

In 2015 there was increasing criticism of the credibility of the media, especially public broadcasting and established newspapers and magazines , under the catchphrase “ lying press ” . The objects of criticism were subjectively perceived partisanship , distortions and tendentious evaluations in the reporting as well as one-sided representations in the refugee crisis of 2015. As a result, a loss of public trust in the established media was diagnosed, but only a few scientifically reliable studies templates. In view of the central role of the citizens' trust in the supporting institutions of democracy , an increasing need for long-term trust research became apparent.

The starting point for media attention for the Mainz study was an interview in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit with Oliver Quiring and Tanjev Schultz in spring 2017, in which both researchers stated that the widely suspected crisis of confidence had no empirical support. Rather, a polarization of the opinion climate can be observed when assessing the credibility of the established media. This was followed in 2017 by over 20 media reports on the data from the Mainz study, including on Spiegel Online , in Tagesspiegel , in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , on Deutschlandfunk and in contributions by the SWR .

The media response to the data from the fourth wave of surveys presented in January 2018 was similarly high; the main news programs from ARD and ZDF , Tagesschau and heute , reported e.g. Sometimes with comments like that of ZDF editor-in-chief Peter Frey . The findings were also It is received, for example, in Spiegel , the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Süddeutsche Zeitung , as well as in a large number of regional daily newspapers via the German Press Agency . Above all, it was emphasized that, compared to the previous year, citizens' distrust in the mainstream media had decreased and, given the lack of media education, more social efforts were needed to impart media skills.

The Mainz long-term study media trust received academic attention through lectures at specialist communications science conferences in 2017 and 2018, including the Annual International Journal of Press / Politics Conference in Oxford and meetings of the International Communication Association , the European Communication Research and Education Association, the International Association for Media and Communication Research and the World Association for Public Opinion Research .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nikolaus Jackob: Seen, read - believed ?: Why the media don't depict reality and people still trust them. Olzog, Munich 2012.
  2. ^ Institute for Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf
  3. ^ Journalistic seminar of the Institute for Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
  4. ^ Research initiative of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate
  5. ^ Research focus on media convergence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
  6. ↑ Interview of February 9, 2017 in DIE ZEIT.
  7. ↑ Online documentation of the media response to the study
  8. ↑ Report from the Today program on January 31, 2018