site.btaCEM: Over 57% of Bulgarians Believe They Recognize Fake News

More than 57% of Bulgarians believe that they rather manage to recognize fake news, said Thursday Lydia Yordanova, the owner and manager of the Exacta Research Group. She was speaking at a meeting of the Council for Electronic Media (CEM).  

Yordanova presented the results of a sociological survey on the media content consumption in the election campaign for the June 9 national and European parliamentary elections. 

Yordanova said that this survey focuses solely on whether people can assess which news are fake and which are not. Of course, a significant next step would be to find out the respondents' assessment criteria. The survey was carried out in the period from May 28 to June 6. A total of 1,050 adults were selected and interviewed face-to-face. 

Despite the disappointment and apathy of Bulgarians, those of them who have the habit of following the media, information and analyses on political issues are more than Bulgarians who do not have such a habit, said Lydia Yordanova.

Approximately 63% of those informed by social networks are not checking the source of information on electoral issues, the data show. Some 73% of respondents said that journalists should play an active role when conducting election debates by asking critical questions, pushing for answers and making sure that facts and circumstances are clarified.

About 61% of respondents followed June 9 elections in traditional media (television, radio, print media), 25% on the Internet and 14% did not follow election day. Compared to data from a similar Exacta survey in March 2023, the use of traditional media as a source of information on election day dropped by 8%.

CEM Sent 32 Alerts to Central Election Commission 

CEM's Monitoring and Analysis Directorate also presented its report on the media content during the election campaign. It monitored the period from May 10 to June 9, covering 13 radio programmes, 13 television programmes and 12 non-linear media.

A total of 32 alerts of non-compliance with the Electoral Code were sent by CEM to the Central Election Commission (CEC), said Zornitsa Gyurova from CEM's Monitoring and Analysis Directorate. She noted that 11 media services announced the results of the exit polls on the elections before the end of the election day. Six alerts were sent for violation of good manners, statements with anti-Semitic positions, four alerts concerned lack of transparency on campaign financing, four were sent for omitting the mandatory message that buying and selling votes is a crime, two - for the use of Bulgarian flag in the agitation, one - for the use of religious symbols in the agitation, among others.

Political Parties Not Satisfied With Debate Format 

A journalist from the Bulgarian National Television (BNT), Mariela Dragolova, said that in recent years political parties, especially the big ones, do not like the debate format used by Bulgarian media. They try to neglect speaking out in a debate, from which the public loses.

Another BNT journalist Dobrina Cheshmedzhieva said that the debate is one of the purest forms in which the differences between the candidates can be found out. Cheshmedzhieva argued that if televisions want to have the big political debate, they have to give equal time to all political parties in prime time. “We gave them a ridiculous amount of time, seven minutes each, because we cannot feature all the candidates in three programmes," she said.

University of National and World Economy Chief Assistant Professor Iliya Valkov noted that the problem is not only that the party leaders do not want to participate in debates, they also refuse to give interviews to major media outlets and prefer “convenient” journalists. He said that data from the annual survey of the Association of European Journalists in Bulgaria show that political pressure has increased to 70%.

The Director of the Digital Programmes at Bulgarian National Radio, Ivo Todorov, said that public radio also had a problem with politicians’ participation in free formats, "because they are attended mostly by smaller parties that use every opportunity for on-air presentation"

Center for the Study of Democracy Director of Research Todor Galev said that about 15% of the news in online media and more than 40% of social media posts contain disinformation. Almost 70% of the sources of disinformation messages were political leaders, Galev said.

Stoil Tsitselkov of the Public Board of the Central Election Commission said that campaigning is politicians’ responsibility and “when it comes to a 2-in-1 campaign, we hardly heard a European campaign, we focused mainly on our local problems, but this is hard for journalists to change, when even candidates for European Parliament talked mainly about Bulgaria in their appearances".