“They didn’t all die, but all were hit.” Like the animals sick with the plague described by La Fontaine, we are all affected by distrust of information and the media, according to the authors of a study by the think tank Destin Commun, “Information: Fifty Shades of Defiance”.
According to their estimates, only 9% of French people say they have no difficulty trusting information. Far from only affecting a minority of individuals, this distrust has even become “mainstream”, to the point of forming what the authors call a “continuum”, from critical thinking to systematic conspiracy. Another figure revealing the extent of the phenomenon: 70% of French people questioned say they fear that people around them (family, friends, colleagues) will be misled by misinformation. In France, this concern does not vary according to gender, generations, diploma, level of income, or place of residence, and little according to political sensitivities.
This is why the authors based their analysis not on socio-demographic indicators, but on psychosocial determinants and value systems. These draw a typology in six groups, all located on the continuum of defiance: optimistic Liberals (“weakened confident”), Stabilizers (“moderate informed”), disillusioned Militants (“selective consumers”), Identitarians (“mania obsession”), the Waiters (“suspension of judgement”) and the Left behind (“media secession”).
The “completely relative” confidence of the optimistic Liberals
Unsurprisingly, the Left Behind (angry, disengaged and feeling abandoned) and the Identitaires (older, conservative, declinist) are the two groups in which distrust of information is the strongest, followed by disillusioned Militants (younger graduates, cosmopolitans, sensitive to inequalities, pessimists, secularists). Conversely, confidence is strongest among Optimistic Liberals, followed by Disillusioned Activists and Stabilizers.
Let those who recognize themselves in the family of Stabilizers (installed, committed, rational, compassionate and ambivalent) think again: if their mode of consumption reflects a reasoned, moderate and methodical posture, their “moderation does not exempt them from a certain dose of doubt, which can sometimes go as far as mistrust”.
Even the family of optimistic Liberals (younger, individualistic, pragmatic, confident, entrepreneurs) is not spared: the latter are certainly less critical than the other groups, but their confidence is quite relative, and far from being unshakable. Optimistic Liberals are thus only one in four (26%) to declare that they “have no difficulty trusting the information they read or see”. This figure is still clearly different from the average of the French, who are only 9% to declare to have confidence in the information.
Pathological relationship to information
How to explain it? The French people questioned made three fundamental criticisms of the information: it is too fragmented and plethoric, too negative (39% of Left Behind against 28% of respondents on average), and unreliable or even biased. Thus, the consumer of information nourishes the fear of incurring three risks: drowning, depression and bewilderment. “These three criticisms, by turning into fears, lead to a broad rejection of information. But the latter contrasts at the same time with a de facto addiction, particularly with regard to continuous news channels”, explains Laurence de Nervaux, director of Destin Commun and co-author of the study.
In fact, in the discussion groups set up by the Destin Commun team, some people have let it be known that they [ent] the information so as not to be disturbed by this permanent and anxiety-inducing noise”. An expression that the authors describe as a form of self-delusion. They thus cite the case of a “stabilizer” who, after declaring that he was only looking more news, had admitted that he still watched an hour a day of continuous news channels. “Addiction is all the more insidious as the French are unaware of it”, conclude the authors in their study.
Between addiction and overdose, many French people thus betray a “pathological” relationship to information, which social networks only amplify. 72% of those who consult them regularly for information share the concern of being exposed to disinformation, compared to 65% of those who never use them for this.
Get out of a binary posture
The French therefore take refuge, according to the authors, in a critical spirit which sometimes turns into generalized skepticism. At the risk of slipping from relativization to relativism. Some respondents thus give more credit to the point of view of their relatives or to their personal opinion than to the word of the media “in a complete confusion between facts and opinion”.
The authors have thus identified a new “equation of protest”, which is the product of three factors: uncertainty, complexity and the feeling of helplessness, faced with a context shaken by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis. The consequences of this equation being likely to range from “physical protest to conspiratorial orientations”, explains Laurence de Nervaux.
This is why the authors call for a real “informational transition” to safeguard social cohesion and democracy. To do this, the latter propose in particular to strengthen pedagogy on the information professions, review the model of information processing and finally encourage new rhetoric of authenticity and veracity (either for the media, to reconstruct a journalistic authority by adapting to the codes of platforms such as TikTok or Twitch).
“But fighting misinformation requires getting out of a binary posture that would oppose conspirators and guarantors of reason,” insists Laurence de Nervaux. At the end of 2021, a previous study by Destin Commun had revealed that more than one in three French people (35%) considered that “in general, the truth about COVID-19 is being hidden from us”. And in the summer of 2022, almost one in two French people (46%) agreed with the statement that “the increase in the price of oil and gas is part of a government plan to force to switch to renewable energies”. In both cases, these opinions are certainly much more widespread among the Left Behind and the Identitaires. But the proportions do not drop below 20% in the other four groups…