There is strong public interest in Latvia's economic situation, but the performance of Latvian Public Media (LSM) on this topic is being judged more critically this year than a year ago, the results of a population survey indicate. This points to a need to strengthen LSM's content offering in the direction of investigation and analysis of economic issues in future, the Public Electronic Mass Media Council (SEPLP) concludes. At the same time, LSM enjoys consistently high public trust, both in comparison with commercial media and with information published on social networks and texts generated by artificial intelligence chatbots. Moreover, in emergency situations most people would look for reliable information precisely in the public media, which confirms LSM's importance in crisis communication and in providing trustworthy information.

This year, for the first time, the annual public-benefit population survey of the public media — carried out with the aim of involving Latvia's residents in assessing LSM's work — established which issues the public considers topical and a priority to address. This innovation gives LSM's content makers information about the specific topics that need heightened attention, so that public media content provides new and useful knowledge to all of Latvia's residents. Asked to name up to three of the most pressing problems, respondents most often marked health care (37%), the state of Latvia's economy (30%), and support for families and children, and demography (20%). Marked least often were questions of religion, morality and ethics, as well as sport and leisure and European Union matters.

At the same time, respondents also assess LSM's performance in covering various topics, which makes it possible to gauge LSM's work against audience demand. Compared with last year, those who consume LSM — and are therefore able to judge the content it produces — have become more critical of the public media's ability to provide new and useful knowledge about business: whereas in each of the previous three years (2023–2025) around 48% of LSM users rated this positively, this year the figure is 43%, and the drop is statistically significant. As a result, both the share choosing a neutral position on this question ("neither agree nor disagree" — 42% against 39% last year) and the share of negative assessments (15% this year, 13% last year) have risen. The share of positive assessments has fallen most for Latvijas Televīzija (from 48% to 42%) and Latvijas Radio (from 48% to 41%), while the LSM.LV portal's work in this area was rated on a par with last year, with 46% of LSM users expressing a positive view both this year and last.

It should be stressed that the public's assessment of LSM's work on topics falling within health care and family matters has not seen a similar trend and remains consistently high. Specifically, users of LSM content most often (43%) agree that LSM provides content about the mental and physical health of society (45% last year; the change is within the margin of error), and there are similar results for building relationships within the family and with children (45% this year, 42% last year; the difference is within the margin of error). Assessments of cultural topics also remain positive on average — for example, 55% of respondents agree that LSM improves their knowledge of national culture and local traditions. This confirms that individual thematic editorial teams, with a well-considered offering of comprehensive and varied content that delivers cultural material across different platforms in a range of genres and formats at frequent, even daily, intervals, are best able to satisfy the audience's need for that content — and it points to a possible way of developing economic topics in public media content in future as well.

According to calculations based on the survey data, three in four (74%) of Latvia's residents use LSM at least once a week, with no significant change since 2023. Low content consumption is still observed among ethnic minorities, reaching 60% of these residents at least once a week. It should be stressed that the survey began before LSM adopted, as of 1 January 2026, a conceptually new approach to producing minority-language content and reaching those audiences, closing the Latvijas Radio 4 channel, which broadcast in minority languages, and creating a single editorial team for the LSM portal. It is still too early to assess the results of this new approach. At the same time, the survey data indicate that people from ethnic minorities have a greater interest in economic topics in the media than Latvians, confirming LSM's potential to reach a wider section of this group if the coverage of economic topics in LSM content is broadened. Among those who consume public media content less often than once every six months, one of the main reasons — in the cases of Latvijas Televīzija and Latvijas Radio specifically — is a lack of content on the topics that interest them. Most often, however, these respondents pointed to their use of alternative media that are not produced by professional media organisations (chat services (Telegram, Whatsapp etc.), websites, blogs and the like created by various organisations and individuals), which in the respondents' view offer them information that is not available elsewhere.

At the same time, the public continues to rate the quality of public media content highly, with half of those surveyed (51%) fully or partly agreeing that LSM content is of good quality, against 20% who fully or partly disagree, with the rest expressing a neutral view. LSM also enjoys the highest level of trust among various sources of information, receiving full or partial trust from 47% of respondents (48% last year), with 29% expressing a neutral attitude or partial distrust, while complete distrust was expressed least often, by just 24% of those surveyed. Trust in LSM's news desks remains similar to trust in LSM as a whole. By comparison, only 40% trust commercial media, and only one in three (33%) their news — a similar level (31%) to text generated by artificial intelligence chatbots (for example, ChatGPT, Grok AI, Google Gemini ChatBot and others). According to the survey results, more than half (53%) of Latvia's residents use these tools at least once a week to learn or check facts, or find information about an event and the like, unrelated to their immediate work duties. People trust information and opinions published on social networks least of all, with only 17% rating them as reliable.

This year, for the first time, the survey also established how people behave in emergency situations when it comes to obtaining information, with the results confirming the high importance of the public media and the public's trust in them in unforeseen circumstances. Asked to name the three most important sources of reliable information should an emergency occur in Latvia (for example, alarm sirens, enormous storm damage, a blast wave), one in two (53%) named information provided by the public media, including information published by LSM on social networks. Only 19% named information provided by commercial media, citing instead the state emergency services (33%) and contact with relatives or friends (26%) more often. Among those who did not choose LSM as one of their three priority sources of information, thematic chat channels (Whatsapp, Telegram) were chosen more often (9% against 3% among those who named LSM as a priority source of information), as were social media opinion leaders (13% against 7%), but these were not the most popular choices for this group either: they most often named contact with the state emergency services (41% against 26%) or with relatives and friends (32% against 21%).

The survey also established the attitudes towards LSM's content of people holding different values, that is, of differing ideological outlooks. Unlike most surveys, where respondents' ideology is determined by the researchers themselves, this survey used a machine learning method to build a comprehensive picture of the ideological landscape of Latvian society from people's own answers and views. The results show that those most dissatisfied with LSM's work are the strongly conservative, as well as socialists, both moderate and pronounced. It should be stressed that, according to the study's results, the strongly conservative make up only 4% of Latvian society, and roughly as many can be regarded as socialists. At the same time, it can be observed that consuming LSM content reduces polarisation and fragmentation between ideologically opposed groups, with the public broadcaster bringing about a shared understanding of the priorities the state needs to address.

The 2026 survey was carried out in cooperation with AS "Norstat Latvija" between 8 December 2025 and 8 January 2026, surveying 3,330 respondents online (the CAWI method) in a nationally representative internet panel. The survey design used a controlled randomised experimental approach: each respondent was asked questions about only one of the three public media brands (LTV, LR or LSM.lv), assigned at random. Nine indicators — society, democracy, culture, sport, knowledge, creativity, reach, quality and impact — were calculated in accordance with the methodology approved by SEPLP. In order to involve the public even more effectively in assessing LSM's work in future, the methodology is due to be reviewed this year so that it matches the latest data collection methods and possibilities, assessing LSM's reach and the quality of its work from the public's point of view as objectively as possible.

The study can be viewed here: https://www.seplp.lv/lv/sabiedriskais-labums#sabiedriskais-labums-2026