According to data collected by Magenta Consulting in May 2010, from 1400 respondents aged over 15 years, from 24 urban centers of the country, recommendations recorded the highest level of trust as an information source (61%), followed by television (57%) and Internet –54%.
51% of Moldovans trust radio as a good source to get informed, 48% trust newspapers and other 44% rely on magazines. Otherwise stated, whenever Moldovans obtain some information, it is more likely they will trust in what their friends and relatives say, than the information provided by broadcasters. A very interesting trend that can be concluded from the research is that Internet, as mean of information, has a degree of trust with 3 p.p. lower than the level recorded for television, overcoming other mass media like radio, newspapers and magazines.
Figure 1: The level of trust in the means of information, %
The multicriterial analysis pointed out that the highest level of trust in recommendations and TV is showed by those with a monthly income over 6000 MDL, while Internet is preferred in a larger share by young people aged under 35 years, those who are single or who live in concubinage, and also by Romanian speakers and with different levels of income.
People aged over 45 years and graduates of general school are those who believe the least in the trustworthiness of the data provided by Internet.
Living in a very dynamic world, where we are offered a large amount of information to be processed by our mind, we incline to trust more or less in one mean of information or another, and therefore we prefer to check these different sources of information to be sure of our decisions.