Maltese people ‘twice as likely to trust government than media’

Maltese people are twice as likely to trust the government than the media, a new study has indicated.

According to the latest Eurobarometer survey, only 23% of Maltese people said that they trust the media, making it the fourth least likely European population to trust the press – just ahead of the British, the French and the Greeks.

In contrast, 52% of Maltese respondents said that they trust the government – a similar figure to that recorded last year – while only 34% said that they don’t trust it and 14% said that they don’t know. When compared with other EU countries, the Maltese are ranked as the joint ninth most likely population to trust their government.

In total, 40% of respondents to the Eurobarometer survey said that they trust their government, a significant 9% increase since last year, while only 34% said that they trust the media. 

The plight of European journalists at the hands of a distrustful public and intimidatory state authorities and other groups was recently flagged in a study conducted by Maltese psychology lecturers Marilyn Clark and Anna Grech.

Out of a sample of 940 journalists, 40% of them said that unwanted interference in their work was bad enough to affect their personal lives. The most common type of unwarranted interference was psychological violence – including humiliation, belittlement, intimidation, threats, slandering and smear campaigning – reported by 69% of the sample.

53% of the journalists sampled flagged cyberbullying – in the form of accusations of being partisan, personal attacks, public defamation and smear campaigns.

23% of the respondents claimed to have experienced arrest, investigation, threat of prosecution and actual prosecution under a number of laws.

Male journalists were more likely to be threatened with force, intimidated by police and experience physical assault, whereas female journalists were more likely to experience sexual harassment or violence.