Proximity Between Citizens and Journalists as a Determinant of Trust in the Media : An Application to Italy

This study presents an analysis of trust in types of media with an application to the Italian context. In particular, we focus on the role played by the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ political leanings while differentiating between traditional (press and TV) and new (internet and social networks) media. To do so, we assume, within the Hierarchy of Influences Model, that the individual level is increasingly influent in shaping news content. Then, we argue that because of the hybrid media system journalists political leaning are more apparent than ever. In such new environment, citizens have clear(er) knowledge about journalists’ main ideological leanings and that this becomes a crucial issue in affecting their attitude towards media in terms of trust, in particular the perception of citizens with respect to journalists’ honesty and fairness. The spatial theory of voting backs such assumption. To test our hypotheses, we use an original survey on a representative sample of Italian journalists conducted within the Worlds of Journalism Study Network framework to infer journalists’ distribution across a left to right ideological scale. We then contrast such data with data from the Eurobarometer survey to understand citizens’ political leanings and their attitudes toward news media.