The News International phone hacking scandal has taken a major toll on U.K. citizens’ opinion of their country’s press, a new survey found.
According to PBS U.K. Trust report’s YouGov survey, which The Guardian had the results of today, 58 percent of adults in the U.K. said the hacking affair has had a negative effect on their perception of the British press, while 51 percent said that the scandal has made them less trusting of all British news organizations.
In the U.S., 25 percent of people said their trust in U.K. media outlets has been negatively impacted by the scandal.
The study also showed a marked difference between what news outlets people in the U.K. and U.S. put their confidence in. In the U.K., TV is the most trusted source of news, with 64 percent of people finding it credible, while radio follows with 58 percent. Just 38 percent of readers consider newspapers trustworthy, and magazines are last at 25 percent.
Americans, however, still deem newspapers the most reliable source of information, with 44 percent of people reporting them as trustworthy. TV and magazines follow with 42 percent each.
Americans also rely more on information from the Internet: 19 percent of people trust news from social media, while 18 percent trust blogs. Those numbers are lower in the U.K., where 15 percent of people consider Twitter a credible source of news and just 9 percent believe the same of blogs. Dedicated news sites, however, have a good deal of clout in the U.K., where 55 percent of people deem them credible.
