LONDON: Around one-third of people in the Arab world did not trust the reporting of any media outlets covering the Russia-Ukraine conflict, an Arab News-YouGov survey has revealed.
And most Arabs questioned for the poll felt that Russian media was the least reliable.
Of the 7,835 people surveyed, 33 percent said they did not trust any media coverage of the war. However, 27 percent of respondents believed in the authenticity of Arabic news reports, and 21 percent thought Western media was dependable. Only 8 percent trusted the Russian media, and 11 percent other news sources such as social media and non-traditional outlets.
According to the Arab Youth Survey in 2020, 79 percent of Arab youth got their news from social media compared with just 25 percent in 2015. Additionally, a 2021 trust and credibility survey found that 52 percent of those quizzed were trusting of traditional media, a decrease on 69 percent for the previous year.
A rise in fake news has led to an increase in public distrust of the media, with 59 percent globally feeling that journalists and reporters deliberately tried to mislead people.
Out of the 14 countries surveyed, lack of trust in any media covering the conflict in Ukraine was especially high in Syria (47 percent), Lebanon (42 percent), Kuwait (41 percent), and Algeria, Bahrain, and Oman (all 40 percent).
There was little trust in Western media coverage of the conflict, possibly due to anti-Arab bias in some European and Western news media reports.
For instance, CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata said in the early days of the conflict that Ukraine, “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
