Damien Mulley

Richard mentions a BBC and Reuters survey on blogs and whether people trust them compared to traditional news sources. Details of media trust survey.

The results:

National TV was the most trusted news source overall (trusted by 82%, with 16% not trusting it) – followed by national/regional newspapers (75% vs 19%), local newspapers (69% vs 23%), public radio (67% vs 18%), and international satellite TV (56% vs 19%). Internet blogs were the least trusted source (25% vs 23%) – with one in two unable to say whether they trusted them.

TV was also seen as the most ‘important’ news source (56%) followed by Newspapers (21%), internet (9%) and radio (9%).

Richard said:

I think this is more reason still to see blogs as supplementing, rather than supplanting, established media.

I’d agree with Richard on this. I think some get too excited that us bloggers will take down O’Reilly Corp and Thomas Crosbie Media. Not a chance. However I’m quite upbeat about these figures and I said as much in the comments on Richard’s post. Blogging is just a baby at the moment especially when you compare it to the age of the printing press. 50% of people couldn’t give an opinion on blogs with 25% saying they’d trust them and 23% saying they’d mistrust them. The same level of mistrust they have with local papers. They mistrust public radio and satellite TV more! That’s fairly interesting.

More importantly though to me, I think everyone should have a healthy level of mistrust of all news sources so that they’d check more than one source and on perspective on the news. This to me would make the news more fair and balanced. Also if blogging has a long way to catch up to be as trusted as TV news then good because if blogs ever reach that level I think the blog quality will be much better than TV news. You won’t get much credibility or trust from other bloggers unless you back everything you say with a few links to other sources. Bloggers in a way provide you with their raw newsfeeds whereas TV and radio do not.

I’d be disappointed if everyone that read this blog took what I said as gospel. DO NOT (fully) TRUST THIS MAN

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 9:01 pm and is filed under blogs, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.