IDC poll: Nearly half of Israelis believe media represents ‘Ashkenazi elite’ interests

The survey also found that digital media has maintained its dominance as the preferred method of consuming news in Israel.

By LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI
Updated: MARCH 24, 2016 00:50
Israel Hayom newspaper (photo credit: REUTERS)
Israel Hayom newspaper
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Nearly half of Israelis believe that the local media represents and protects the interests and hegemony of the Ashkenazi elite, according to a survey released this week.
The poll was conducted ahead of the 2016 DIGIT conference at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya Sammy Ofer School of Communications.
The fourth annual DIGIT conference to be held April 4 is the only such conference dealing exclusively with online media. It will focus on the major issues that concern the digital media in Israel and abroad.
According to the findings of the survey, the platform of digital media has maintained its dominance as the preferred method of news consumption in Israel.
Thirty percent of respondents said they prefer to receive news updates from Internet news sites, compared to 23% via television, 14% by radio and only 13% by daily print newspapers, the survey found.
When breaking the results down by age group, it became evident that 19% of younger respondents, aged 16 to 35, preferred to get their news updates from social media, compared to only 12% of people aged 36 and over.
In contrast, 17% of respondents aged 36 and older preferred to receive news updates via radio, compared to 8% of young respondents.
With regards to reporters, 41% of respondents said they believed all reporters were equally “serious and professional,” while 5% said no reporters are “serious or professional enough.”
Thirty-four percent of respondents said television news correspondents are the most serious and professional compared to only 5% of daily print newspaper reporters, 5% of radio reporters, and 3% of Internet reporters.
This year, the survey also addressed the issue of sexual violence, which has dominated local headlines in recent months.
According to the survey, the majority – 55% – of respondents believed that media reports accurately represented the reality, while some 35% of respondents said the media was exaggerating coverage.
The survey was conducted throughout the month of March 2016 and included 503 people, aged 16 and up, interviewed via Internet and telephone, with a 4.5 percentage point margin of error.
“The digital media continues to respond to the needs of Israelis for fast-paced news content,” said Roy Katz, founder and producer of the DIGIT conference.
“The terrorist attacks in the last six months and the speed with which information is distributed from the scene, some visually shocking and sometimes unreliable, on social media, requires the major news sites to compete almost impossibly and still maintain faced-paced updates and reliability,” he said.
Katz added that the results of the survey showed that digital platforms, especially social media, allow for “personal expression” among the sectors who have felt “disadvantaged and underrepresented for many decades.”