BERLIN, Nov. 20 (Xinhua) -- Sixty-one percent of Germans consider the information provided by the German media to be "credible," according to a survey published by German public broadcaster WDR on Wednesday.
Last year, 65 percent of respondents considered German media information to be credible, so "this value fell slightly," the WDR noted.
Around three-quarters of survey respondents rated Germany's daily newspapers and public broadcasters as credible, while the so-called "yellow" or sensationalist press and social media were largely rated as "less credible," the WDR found.
At 78 percent, the highest credibility rate was "once again" attributed to public radio stations, while only seven percent of Germans surveyed considered the "yellow" press to be credible, according to the WDR.
The results of the survey would show the importance of public broadcasters as well a high quality press as "stable pillars of our society," said Joerg Schoenenborn, WDR's director of programing.
Public broadcasting was "indispensable" for 82 percent of the Germans surveyed. Nearly as many found that public broadcasting had "an important or very important contribution to the formation of opinion in Germany," according to the WDR.
Almost four out of ten Germans "still assume that there are political guidelines for media reports," the WDR noted. Fifty-eight percent said politics had no influence on German media, five percentage points more compared to 2018.
The representative survey for which 1,000 voters in Germany were interviewed was conducted by electoral and political pollster Infratest dimap.
