The goal for selecting news outlets was to ask about a list of well-known outlets that capture a broad range of news media, in terms of platform (print, radio, TV or digital), audience size, funding sources (public vs. private) and ideological appeal. Taking into consideration questionnaire length, question battery length, the mode of the survey (telephone) and cost, researchers decided to ask questions about eight outlets in each country.
The selection of the final list of eight outlets involved several steps. First, researchers took into consideration audience data and self-reported usage data from the Reuters Institute’s 2017 Digital News Reports, comScore, Alexa.com, Eurotopics.net, and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) to generate a list of the top outlets per country. From this list, researchers selected outlets that represented a range of platforms and funding sources, with a preference for more widely used outlets within these categories. As part of this selection process, a panel of expert advisers was consulted: Charlie Beckett, professor at the London School of Economics; Gianpietro Mazzoleni, professor at the University of Milan; Adam Thomas, director of the European Journalism Centre; Barbara Thomaß, professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum; and Claes de Vreese, professor and program group director of political communication and journalism at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. In addition, researchers reviewed lists of outlets in relevant academic work and the transcripts from a series of focus groups that Pew Research Center conducted in May and June 2017 in France, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK in order to ensure that the selected outlets appealed to people across a wide range of political orientations. In certain cases, these consultations and focus groups resulted in adding smaller outlets to the list in order to capture the scope and variety of the news media landscape in each country.
By asking survey questions about eight outlets that vary across four key factors – audience size, type of platform, funding structure and ideological appeal – the study was able to capture public views about the broad scope of each country’s media system. It is important to keep in mind, however, that a list of eight outlets cannot represent or capture all of the nuances of and full variety within the media landscape of any country.
The final list of eight outlets in each country asked about consisted of the following:
France
- BFM
- France 2
- TF1
- Le Monde
- Le Figaro
- Libération
- Mediapart
- L’Express
Germany
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- ARD
- Sat1
- RTL
- Bild
- Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ)
- Der Spiegel
- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
- Die Tageszeitung (taz) 5
Italy
- Rai News
- Mediaset News
- La7
- La Repubblica
- Corriere della Sera (Corriere)
- Il Giornale
- Il Fatto Quotidiano
- Libero
The Netherlands
- the NOS (NOS)
- RTL
- Algemeen Dagblad (AD)
- de Volkskrant
- De Telegraaf
- nl
- GeenStijl
- nl
Spain
- Televisión Española (TVE)
- Antena 3
- El País
- El Mundo
- ABC
- El Diario
- Público
- La Vanguardia
Sweden
- Sveriges Television (SVT)
- TV4
- Dagens Nyheter (DN)
- Svenska Dagbladet (SvD)
- Aftonbladet
- Expressen
- Nya Tider
- Flashback
Denmark
- DR News
- TV 2 News
- Politiken
- Jyllands-Posten
- BT
- Ekstra Bladet
- Børsen
- Information
UK
- BBC
- Sky
- ITV
- The Guardian
- The Times
- The Daily Mirror
- Daily Mail
- HuffPost
In addition to this series of questions about these specific outlets, respondents were also asked in an open-ended question to volunteer their main source for news. This allowed respondents to name any source, not limiting them to the specific ones asked about in the survey questions. All outlets that were named by respondents as their main source for news are reported in the topline. Outlets that were not recognized or were unintelligible by the local vendor or Pew Research Center are grouped together as “other” in the to the topline.
