More than half of the population of Ukraine (56%) trust the Ukrainian media, according to a sociology poll conducted by the Research&Branding Group.
"In general, some 56% Ukrainians trust the media and 38.5% don’t. There is no particular difference between regions, apart from in the central regions of Ukraine, where the rate is higher (64%)," Head of the Research&Вranding Group Yevhen Kopatko said at a press conference in Kyiv on December 16, while presenting the results of the poll.
He also said 69% respondents use television as their main source of information (73% in the southeastern and 65% in the western regions of Ukraine). Some 81% the respondents prefer receiving information from central TV channels and 37% from the local media. According to the results of the poll, the level of confidence in central TV channels is higher (54%) than in local TV channels (16%).
Kopatko also said that some 15.5% respondents use the Internet as a source of information.
Some 22.7% participants of the poll think that positive information prevails in the information space of Ukraine, while 39.4% respondents find most information negative.
According to Kopatko, over 50% of the respondents prefer social and political topics.
The research showed that 64% Ukrainians watch the news every day, some 18.5% watch the news three to four times a week, and only 3.3% Ukrainians do not watch the news at all.
Respondents gave the following criteria for the evaluation of information: reliability (66%), objectivity (52%) and immediacy (36%).
Some 48.6% of the polled said that the information field in Ukraine is a real reflection of the situation in the state, and the other 20.3% disagreed with this statement.
More than half of respondents (51%) think that there are threats to the freedom of speech in Ukraine, while 33% respondents don’t think so. Some 53.6% respondents think that political position of the owner of the media influence the objectivity of the information, while 38% of those polled think that censorship of the authorities affects it, and 10.6% find the reason in the self-censorship of journalists.
According to the research, 53% of the respondents think that Ukrainian media are more free and independent from the authorities than Russian, while 35% respondents don’t think so.
Research&Branding Group carried out the sociology research in 24 regions of Ukraine and in Crimea. Some 2,076 respondents participated in the poll.
