Dubious news and online content is everywhere. Even here, in the birthplace of democracy.

The challenges facing media outlets across the globe are many, including widespread public distrust, dubious claims spreading virally on social media, and a broken economic model for the news industry. But while these problems are common in many countries, they appear to be particularly severe in Greece.

A survey of the Greek population conducted by George Siakas at the University of Macedonia found that a wide majority of respondents — 74% — trusted Greek journalists either “only a little” or “not at all.”

The same survey also found that less than one-third of respondents thought the public should have to pay for the journalistic content they consume, which would hamper efforts to provide more professionalized journalism. And a whopping 92% believed that journalists in Greece were too dependent on the government or political parties.

The results were released at an early October conference in Athens to which PolitiFact was invited.

Such attitudes are notably stronger in Greece than in other countries, according to separate research presented at the Athens conference by Antonis Kalogeropoulos, a lecturer in communication and media at the University of Liverpool and a research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

In Greece, only 27% of survey respondents said they trusted the media most of the time, which tied for the second-lowest score among the 24 European countries studied. It was also lower than all but two of the 22 countries surveyed in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The United States was one of the rare countries that ranked lower than Greece, at 26%.

Greece was the only one of 10 advanced industrialized nations surveyed in which respondents said that social media does a better job separating fact from fiction than traditional media outlets do. To be sure, neither type of media fared well: 28% of respondents in Greece said that social media did a good job at separating fact and fiction, while 19% said the same of traditional media.

Compared with northern and western European countries where trust in institutions is higher, “we do come from another place,” said Stelios Pournis, a journalist with the Greek fact-checking site Ellinika-Hoaxes.

Conversations with journalists in Athens point to several factors that have made a lack of trust in journalism an unusually big problem in Greece.

One is the Greek economic and debt crisis, which began in 2009 and involved government dissembling and broken promises. “The majority of the Greek population suffered and keep suffering” from the economic crisis, said Anna-Kynthia Bousdoukou, co-founder and managing director of the three-and-a-half-year-old non profit journalistic organization iMEdD (Incubator for Media Education and Development), which organized the Athens conference. “They felt people had lied to them — it was a huge trauma. They lost any trust they may have had in the media and politicians.”

Recently, revelations that the government has wiretapped journalists as well as members of other political parties have exacerbated public concerns about trust, journalists here said.

Yet at the same time, many Greeks feel that the media is too closely aligned with the government. This sentiment is reinforced by the close connections between media barons and political leaders, and by the media industry’s increasing dependence on state advertising to pay its bills.

“The government has an organized plan for government advertising, by favoring or excluding media, so as not to face strong criticism on any claim,” said Manos Horianopoulos, editorial director at the website News247.gr. “The media, due to the years of economic crisis, often do not have the power to resist what the government wants.”

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