Informace o publikaci
Trust in Public Service Television Before and During the Time of Polycrisis
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| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Citace | |
| Popis | In our study using data from three representative surveys of Czech adults conducted in 2019, 2020, and 2022, we focus on how the two recent major crises, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, affected the trust of the Czech audiences in the Czech public service television (CT). Public service media (PSM) are seen as key high-quality news providers (Van Aelst et al., 2021) and integrative institutions (Donders, 2012; Holtz-Bacha, 2021), and these roles become even more important in crises. In Europe, PSM were essential by continuously reporting on both crises (EBU, 2020; Mihelj et al., 2022; Newman et al., 2022). However, the roles and functions of media, including PSM, depend on the audiences’ trust (Fawzi et al., 2021; Strömbäck et al., 2020). According to existing evidence, trust in PSM in crisis may grow (de León et al., 2022; Newman et al., 2022) due to increased media dependency and the need for orientation or the "rally ’round the flag" effect. An increased trust may persist (Knudsen et al., 2023; Newman et al., 2022; Vozab et al., 2023) or decline (Adam et al., 2023; Newman et al., 2022), for example, due to crisis news fatigue and the media cooperative role. Yet, these conclusions do not tackle the situation of subsequent and overlapping crises. Therefore, we explore the evolvement of trust in CT and changes in its selected predictors from the pre-crisis period through the period of polycrisis. Since conditions taking part in shaping trust in media are complex and contextualized (see Fawzi et al., 2021; Tsfati & Ariely, 2014), the predictors we assess include audiences’ socio-demographics, media consumption habits, media-related attitudes, political attitudes and social trusts. Our findings may fruitfully contribute to the debate on the role of PSM (Donders, 2012, 2023). Firstly, in contrast to our expectations, our data show CT trust levels as stable in all three observed years, neither demonstrating increases due to the "rally ’round the flag" effect nor showing declines due to crisis news fatigue or overload. Secondly, CT maintained trust across socio-demographic groups and political attitudes. Thus, though CT played a cooperative role during the pandemic (Motal, 2022), it did not lose its general relevance or was not perceived as "part of the people’s troubles" during the polycrisis, except for anti-system viewers. Thirdly, on the contrary, the data suggest that trust in CT acted as a substitute for declining interpersonal trust, which was particularly important for pandemic management (Stefaniak et al., 2022). Fourth, a nexus of trust (Hanitzsch et al., 2018) in other media entities (journalists, media in general, individually important media) implies that well-functioning PSM can act as so-called guardian of trust (Mehta, 2007) in entities in the media field and the field itself. Furthermore, fifthly, the independence of trust in CT from news consumption shows the vital importance of the educational and entertainment function for PSM’s ability to maintain audiences’ trust (Donders, 2012, 2023; Urbániková & Smejkal, 2023). |
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