Russians have started to trust television less: over March and April, the number of people who treat it as the most reliable information source has gone down by one-third. Such was the conclusion of Accelerate Research, a GroupM study on Russian media consumption, as analyzed by Kommersant.
The researchers asked 1,700 respondents aged 18 to 60 from Russian cities with a population of over 100,000 the following question: “If an event is covered by multiple media from a variety of perspectives, what type of media do you find the most trustworthy?” On March 17, 33% of the respondents said they would trust the television. On April 27, only 23% of the respondents could say the same.
The ratings of several news channels have also sunk since the war broke out: Channel One’s TVR (popularity rate calculated as the daily average time spent by a TV viewer watching the channel they kept on for at least a minute) has dropped by 18% since mid-February and NTV’s by 6%. However, Russia-1’s TVR has stayed the same, and Russia-24’s has even surged by 55%.
The level of trust in Internet media and official online resources has also declined: while 26% of the respondents preferred them on March 17, only 23% reaffirmed their loyalty on April 27. Meanwhile, social media, blogs, and Telegram channels display an opposite trend: 23% of the respondents named them as trustworthy information sources in April as opposed to 19% in March.