Perceptions of journalism and trust in news among traditionalist and digitalist media users: A comparative analysis of Denmark, Spain and USA

This study analyses trust in news and the relevance granted to journalism by different user profiles in three countries (Denmark, Spain and the United States), each from a dif-ferent media system as identified by Hallin and Mancini (2004). For this research we used two online surveys (2019, 2020) carried out by the Reuters Institute with more than 2000 people in each country. Our results show that users who consume news through newspapers, radios and television trust news more than those whose main source of infor-mation are digital devices. Traditionalist users also have a higher degree of satisfaction with the classic functions of journalism: making the powerful accountable (adversarial function), disseminating current information (disseminating function) and explaining current events to the public (interpretative function). There are differences between countries, especially in the evaluation of the adversarial function. Spaniards, who belong to the polarized pluralist system, are the ones who worst value its fulfilment among their country's media.