Europeans with populist views typically trust the news media much less than others and are far more critical of its coverage of key issues such as immigration, the economy and crime, according to a continent-wide survey.

The study also found that in many – but not all – countries, people with populist attitudes are more likely to get their news from social media, and that as many as one-third of all adults pay no attention to the original source of articles they see there.

Pew Research Centre polled more than 16,000 adults in eight western European countries. Those who said ordinary people would do a better job at solving the country’s problems than elected officials, and that politicians did not care what people like them thought, were identified as holding populist views.

The survey found that only 47% of populist sympathisers in Germany trusted the traditional news media, compared with 78% of non-populists – a 31-point difference. It found gaps of 20-plus points in Spain, Sweden, Denmark and France, and a gap of 17 points in Britain.

In seven of the eight countries surveyed, people with populist attitudes were also significantly less likely – by between 11 points (Denmark) and 24 points (Germany) – to say the news media were important to society.

“In western Europe, public views of the news media are now divided more by populist leanings than by … whether someone identifies as politically on the left or the right,” the researchers said, adding that their survey provided a “consistent, cross-national measure of some of the fundamental tenets of populism”.



Populism – the view that government must reflect “the will of the people” and that “the people” and “the elites” are two opposing groups – has made big inroads across western Europe in recent years, from the UK’s Brexit vote to the success of populist parties in elections in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria and Italy.

On specific key issues, people with populist views in Spain were 33 points less likely to say the news media were covering the economy to their satisfaction, while those in Germany were 29 and 31 points less likely to be content with the way the issues of immigration and crime were handled.

In general, public confidence in the media was higher in northern Europe than in the south and the UK, the survey found, with 64% of all adults in Germany saying they trusted their national media, compared with 32% in the UK and 29% in Italy.

Across the eight countries, around 30% of people – ranging from 50% in Italy to 26% in Germany – got news at least daily from social media, with Facebook being by far the most popular platform.



Amid widespread concerns about fake news, about one-third or more of regular social media news consumers in France, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK – though just 16% in Sweden – said they did not pay attention to where this news came from.

There were marked regional differences in news habits, with roughly one-third or more of people in northern Europe (Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark) turning to the same few major news outlets for their news, compared with 21% or less in France, Italy and Spain.