Interest and confidence in news media slightly decreased: Report

Interest in news in the Netherlands has fallen slightly. The group of people who are either not very interested, or not at all interested in news is increasing, especially among young people, the Dutch Media Authority (DMA) reports. At the beginning of this year, before the start of the war in Ukraine, the DMA, together with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, asked roughly 2,000 people about their news consumption for the Digital News Report Nederland 2022.

After two years featuring a great deal of news about the coronavirus pandemic, interest in and use of news has declined. A total of 82 percent of Dutch people still check the news at least daily.

The group of Dutch people who actively avoid the news is small, according to the researchers, but the group has increased in recent years. Young people up to the age of 35 are especially prone to actively avoiding the news. Among young people up to the age of 25, the proportion who are not very, or not at all interested in the news has risen from 11 to 20 percent.

About 56 percent of Dutch people trust most of the news. The level of trust in the news changes every year. Confidence rose during the coronavirus pandemic, and fell again in early 2022, especially among the youngest age group surveyed, those from 18 to 25 years of age. Compared to other countries, the Netherlands still has strong confidence in the majority of news.

Although social media is increasingly chosen as the main source of news, the total use of social media for news is not increasing. More than half of the Dutch consume news via social media. Facebook in particular is used for journalism consumption. Instagram is becoming more popular for the use of news, especially among young people. Of the 18-24 year olds, 35 percent said they remain informed because of Instagram.

The supervisory board notes the trend that direct access to a news app or site is declining, and news is more often consumed via indirect access, such as news-aggregator sites, messages, and search engines. This change is particularly visible among young people. Access to news is therefore increasingly determined by personalized notifications or by the intervention of a recommendation system.