This is a survey about media coverage in the Mediterranean region using the samples from each side of the Mediterranean Sea. It looks at how media shapes perceptions, how people are interested in news about the other side of the Mediterranean and it also takes up questions about how media practices and media research can help one another in understanding these findings.

Generally speaking, people on both sides of the Mediterranean say they are interested in hearing news about each other, whether that be cultural, political, economic, or about sports, and they're very interesting ranges of attitudes towards this kind of views on both sides of the Mediterranean. Generally speaking, people from Europe are more interested

in hearing news about politics and society and cultural issues, and also about religion. A very interesting pattern that emerges is people from the South are more interested in hearing about sports news from the North than the other way around. This kind of research is unique.

It hasn't been very much done before but it bears further research by academic analysts and further discussion by journalists as to how they should interpret the findings. And as they have that discussion, which is one of the purposes of Anna Lindh in its cooperation with UNIMED, they are going to look after the ways in which people felt they were being adequately served by the media coverage they encountered. 

And one question asked was whether people felt that material they had read in the media had changed their attitudes towards people on the other side.

And what was very interesting is that in the North,  that is in Europe, people said that they had seen coverage but that very much, they had not changed their attitudes, whereas it was somewhat less the case in the South that this was so.

And when you've further analyzed this material, you see that there's just a gap between what people like to hear or are interested in hearing and what they're actually encountering in the media. And this kind of gap is precisely the job of such a survey to discover and precisely the work that researchers and practicing journalists need to do as they analyze the results.

Further questions asked what kind of media people trusted when they were looking for information about southern Mediterranean countries or northern Mediterranean countries.

And television in both cases emerged as very much the most trusted media and we have to see from these findings that the most trusted media were also those which were used most. Print media, films, documentaries, books and radio were much more trusted and used on the northern side than the southern side.

Whereas online media was the second most trusted,  on the southern side it was a fourth most so in the north. But when you analyze the results by age you find that younger people on both sides are inclined to put much more use 

and trust in online media than in traditional media.

This is much more pronouncedly the case in the south than the north and I think this bears out other findings from other researchers and the knowledge that there's a disenchantment on the southern side with mainstream printed and even television media.

Now, that kind of finding again opens up the question for researchers and for practicing journalists about how to interpret these findings and one obvious conclusion to be drawn from this research on media is the need to structure these kinds of discussions more coherently.

 And this is where Anna Lindh, the Anna Lindh foundation, dedicated to intercultural work journalists in media, practicing journalists and editors, and even those who own media and academic researchers looking at what media do, can come together.

But they need a structure as I say for that  and I think there is an opportunity here to bring them together in media dialogues about these issues in further research into these

issues and perhaps also in creating a facility for intercultural response so that when major issues like migration or refugees or terrorism arise, we can get more informed discussion using the kind of findings in this research, as well as other expert advice, rather than relying on the immediate response of media to big events, which tends to encourage stereotyping