The British press is regarded as the most “right-wing” and “biased” in Europe, according to a new YouGov survey.
The company polled people from seven major European countries to find out how they perceived the press in their own nations.
They found that 26 per cent of Britons viewed their newspapers, TV and radio as “too right-wing”, more than in any of the other countries surveyed.
By contrast, only 17 per cent of British respondents felt their media was “too left-wing”. The other countries in the survey were France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.
Respondents to the survey were asked whether they felt their country’s media coverage of five key issues was too left-wing, too right-wing, or balanced. The five policy areas analysed were immigration, housing, health, economics and crime.
Between a quarter and a third of Britons felt that British coverage of each of these topics struck a reasonable political balance. However, in each area people were more likely to describe coverage as “too right-wing” than “too left-wing”.
Only Finnish people saw their own press as similarly skewed to the right, with 23 per cent of Finns perceiving a right-wing bias in their media. All five of the other countries in the survey were more likely to assess their own media as tending towards excessively left-wing coverage. Only 19 per cent of French people, for example, perceived their press as biased towards the right.
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Across Europe, an average of 32 per cent of people felt media coverage of the five key issues highlighted by YouGov struck “about the right balance.” 32 per cent of Britons feel their media achieves the right balance when covering crime, but the British press fell behind the average European standard in the four other categories.
A mere 18 per cent of Britons felt that the media was reasonable in its presentation of the refugee crisis, with 29 per cent feeling the media was too right-wing when dealing with questions of immigration.
