Irish media trust up among 'opinion elites'

The 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer has recorded a rise in trust of the mainstream media in Ireland among what the PR firm calls 'opinion elites'.

The survey was conducted using 30-minute telephone interviews among 150 college-educated respondents aged between 35 and 64. All were within the top 25 percent of household income nationally.

Trust in business journalism is among the highest with articles in business magazines rising from 53 to 67 percent.

News coverage on radio went from 48 to 59 percent, TV news coverage on radio went from 54 to 57 percent, and newspaper articles went from 37 to 55 percent.

Highlights of the Irish results can be viewed here and the full in international reported is here (pdf).

Meanwhile, trust in blogs has dropped to just 14 percent. Piaras Kelly of Edelman's Dublin office gives a number of reasons why blogs have a low ranking.

Kelly says: "When people visit them, people don’t distinguish between a blog and a website. A couple of girls in the office are regular visitors of Beaut.ie, but ask them if they read any blogs and they’ll say no". 

Comments

[Chekov]

That's a pretty misleading headline you've put up there. The survey did not measure trust in the mainstream media, it measured levels of trust among the wealthiest part of the population in articles about particular companies in the mainstream media. It is an attempt to quantify the PR benefits of getting news coverage compared to advertising and other PR approaches and has nothing at all to do with measuring generalised trust, even amongst the ABC1 segment of the population covered.

It's also a tiny sample size with a margin of error of over 10%, meaning that it's pretty much statistically worthless. The huge divergence between this year and last in print media, for example, is a telltale sign of unreliable data (you can't tell whether the huge change actually reflects a change in opinion, or is just a sampling artefact).

[Cian]

Having a second, or more like third, look at it, I agree with you.

I first thought the second par qualified the limitations enough in, but I've changed the headline and the first par.

It was 'Irish mainstream media trust up - survey' and is now 'Irish media trust up among 'opinion elites'.