Censis: 60% of Italians Avoid Mainstream Media for Information
Television news loses 3.8 percentage points in just one year and drops to 43.9% of the audience. Facebook decreases by 3.3 points to 33.1%. News websites decline by 4.3%. This is the picture emerging from the 21st Report on Communication by Censis, presented in Rome under the title Information in the Crosshairs: a media system that is losing users across the board, while distrust and disintermediation towards alternative channels are on the rise.
Information is literally "in the crosshairs" on two fronts: the physical one, with 129 journalists killed in the field in 2025 (an all-time record according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, with 86 victims alone in Gaza), and the one of credibility, with a public opinion that blames the media for partisanship and loss of independence. The Report was created in collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo, Mediaset, Rai, and Tv2000.
Media Consumption: TV Holds but Crumbles; Internet Near Saturation
Overall television reaches 93.2% of users (-1 point compared to 2024), but the internal numbers tell a more nuanced story. Traditional TV drops to 79.5% (-3.6%), while web TV rises to 62.0% (+3.6%) and mobile TV reaches 38.6% (+3.7%). Radio holds steady at 78.4%, with smartphone radio growing to 28.2% (+2.8%). Internet and smartphones are nearing saturation: 90.4% and 90.3%, respectively, with social networks at 86.2% (+0.9%).
Paid print newspapers hit a historic low at 21.0%, a decline of 46% since 2007. In contrast, the number of printed book readers grows to 42.4% (+2.3%), the most encouraging figure from the entire Report for traditional publishing. The only information medium gaining traction in the upper tier of the ranking is the Radio News broadcast, which gains 1.7 percentage points.
Generational Comparison: Young People on Instagram, Elderly Stick to TV News
Informational diets change radically based on age. The 14-29 age group primarily informs itself via Instagram (29.9%), television news (26.1%), search engines (24.4%), and TikTok (23.9%). The 30-44 age group relies on Facebook (41.4%) and television news (35.6%), with a significant presence of news websites (20.1%). Among those over 65, television news dominates with 67.4%, while Facebook (29.0%) and all-news TV (25.4%) complete a still strongly broadcast ecosystem.
Reels, Memes, and Information: Distracted Consumption
Reels occupy an increasingly significant space in the social ecosystem, but Italians engage with them largely superficially: 39.8% of social media users watch them distractedly or marginally, while only 7.0% admit they can't limit their viewing. Seven out of ten social users include them within the information universe, but 23.6% consider them intrinsically superficial.
On the meme front, the most relevant data is widespread unawareness: 36.3% of social media users don't even know what they are. Nevertheless, 22.6% have encountered a meme that led them to discover a news story. 54.2% of respondents acknowledge that memes can influence the perception of political and social events ("yes, often" or "sometimes"), with a paradoxical result: those over 65 report being more easily influenced (18.5% "yes, often") than the young (10.0%), likely due to the latter's greater familiarity with the genre.
Active Orientation: Italians Try to Escape Dominant Media
The relationship with dominant media is increasingly conflictual: 59.5% of the population tries to avoid mainstream media (always, often, or sometimes), and 60.6% inform themselves on topics that mainstream media cover little. 66.4% verify the accuracy of news from mainstream media at least sometimes, and 64.6% do the same with alternative and independent sources. 52.2% use social media to find independent interpretations, while only 25.5% are willing to pay for alternative information.
Social Detox: More Desire than Practice
54.8% of Italians have never felt the need to take a break from social media. Among them, 42.9% simply do not feel the need, while 6.4% don’t think about it despite spending a lot of time online, and 5.5% can't imagine their lives without social media. Of the 38.1% who felt the need for a detox, only 15.3% practice it regularly, while 7.6% have tried without success. The main motivations: too much distraction (25.6%), the need to reclaim time for oneself (20.6%), and a sense of dependency (17.8%).
Generative AI: A Paradigm Shift in Information
The Report devotes significant space to the role of generative AI, starting from a structural fact: European companies in the information and communication sector are the largest users of AI in 2025 (62.5%), compared to a much lower average across all businesses. The most used technologies are text mining (42.2%) and natural language processing (42.2%), key tools for analyzing comments, posts, and user behaviors.
On the public perception front, the majority of Italians (61.6%) would not feel comfortable obtaining information from a media outlet entirely generated by AI. 34.8% fear the risk of disinformation and fake news, while 26.8% simply prefer a product created by humans. Those in favor (38.4%) would accept AI primarily with human supervision (30.1%); only 8.3% would accept a completely autonomous system. The Report cites already active concrete cases like Forbes AI News, the first entirely AI-generated news program.