The purpose of this study was to find out the generations millennials and baby boomers approach to the media's veracity and political neutrality. This was done using the following questions: What attitudes does Millennials and Baby Boomers have to the news media's veracity? Are there differences and similarities there when we look at the variables gender and political position?
To define the generations we used Cliff Zukins generation theory. There are several other theories with different definitions of generations, but we chose to limit ourselves to Zukins model because we considered this to be the most relevant to our purpose.
To obtain additional information about the generation's positions on various issues, we have also assumed Paula M Poindexters research on the issue, and Göran Bolins definition of Manheims theory. Finally we used Jesper Strömbäcks definition of the agenda setting theory when it was accurate.
We chose to conduct a survey in order to be able to reach as many respondents as possible. Because we wanted to compare two specific generations with eachother, we used a quota sampling. The answers gave us an overall picture of the different generational attitudes toward the news media.
The results showed that generational affiliation did not affect public confidence in the news media. When we added the gender variable, the result is different, the younger generation of women had significantly higher confidence than men in the same group. Both the younger and the older men had a more critical view of the news media content than women. This shows that gender is a significant variable in the issue of trust.
Political opinion also turned out to be an important variable. The biggest difference was shown in the generation of baby boomers where three quarters of the red voters had a fairly strong confidence in the news media. Those who vote blue in this generation had a significantly lower confidence.
The main difference depending on generational affiliation was shown in the question of how easy it is to spot fake news. Millennials believed it was much easier to determine authenticity in news than baby boomers. Only two percent of the older generation felt that it was easy to spot, the corresponding figure in the younger generation was 12 percent.
The majority of all respondents stated that they believe in a large or fairly large future increase of false news. This result did not affect the respondents' views on how easy it is to see if the news is false.
The conclusion we can draw is that the generational affiliation does not affect the question of confidence in the news media, however, it does have an affect in how easy it is to determine if news is true or false.When measuring confidence towards the news media, political opinion was the most important variable.