Peeling Back Reporting, Building Up Trust
Just before losing his job as White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci vented his distrust of journalists on Twitter, writing: “I made a mistake in trusting a reporter. It won’t happen again.”
The New Yorker had just published Scaramucci’s profanity-laden attacks against his White House colleagues, which he had shared with a reporter. The magazine recounted much of the interview, undercutting Scaramucci’s outrage by emphasizing that its editorial staff acted fairly.
As the Trump administration’s war against the press remains a central theme of this presidency, media outlets are turning to transparency as an effective way to maintain trust with consumers. By being clear and open about how they report, journalists can help their audiences shrug off Trump’s mockery of the press as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.” This trust is essential not only to boost circulation and digital subscriptions, but also to help journalists effectively deliver the news — particularly about topics that are divisive, sensitive, challenging, and painful.
Historical stop-signs
News organizations have traditionally shied away from total transparency, preferring to dole out the news as if it had arrived through divine intervention rather than phone calls, public records, and on-the-street observations. Journalists also counted on impartiality and objectivity to win reader loyalty. For many decades, while print newspapers commanded mass circulations, this strategy worked. As internet scholar David Weinberger wrote in 2009, “During the Age of Paper, we got used to the idea that authority comes in the form of a stop sign: You’ve reached a source whose reliability requires no further inquiry.”
The World Wide Web’s arrival in the mid-’90s changed everything, showering consumers with an overwhelming supply of information. Media organizations struggled to prove their worth faced with competition, and began to recognize the value of shining light on their inner workings.
“Transparency is the new objectivity,” Weinberger declared in the same 2009 blog post, summing up a growing consensus that openness may be journalism’s best bet to keep reader trust and attention.
What are journalists up against today? The latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that 38 percent of Americans it surveyed trust the news. While that’s an increase from 33 percent the year before, the United States still ranks 28th out of three-dozen countries. (Finland scored highest at 62 percent; Greece and South Korea hit rock bottom at 23 percent.)
Learning to open up
The New Yorker may have taken a crack at boosting those numbers with reporter Ryan Lizza’s blow-by-blow account of the Scaramucci call. “Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background,” Lizza wrote. A few days later, Lizza recorded a 13-minute podcast that provided further details and actual tape from the call.
“When you have the White House communications director, a conversation like that, you set some ground rules,” Lizza explained. “But there were no ground rules set. Off-the-record and on-background are bargains set between a source and a journalist.”
It’s a basic rule, drilled into the heads of cub reporters in Journalism 101. Sources in communications roles or top public offices hardly merit any leeway. And yet, Scaramucci got it wrong.
The episode underscored a bigger problem — that news consumers have a vague understanding of basic reporting practices and standards. The New Yorker did a tremendous service by explaining these standards to the public in simple language, without apology, defensiveness, or condescension. In doing so, it cleared up any confusion that could lead to distrust.
Other organizations are also embracing transparency as a way to educate readers and build credibility, often using creative websites, social media, and videos.
The New York Times Insider website, launched in 2015, urges readers to: “Go beyond the headlines, side-by-side with the people who report them…See their decisions. Hear the debates.” In recent months, Insider explained how freelance “stringers” contribute to the Times, offered a reporter’s take on meeting White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and presented a reporter’s rationale for doing a ride-along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It even offered copy-editing quizzes that reveal the minute decisions behind every word and punctuation mark.
Late in 2016, Los Angeles Times reporters took to Reddit to discuss their OxyContin investigations. “We’re back with new reports on how the drug that set off America’s opioid epidemic is now going global. Ask Us Anything,” they wrote. The thread generated 530 comments, and the Times reporters wrote 20 responses.
The Wall Street Journal’s “Face of Real News” video campaign, launched in March 2017, let reporters explain how they tackled tough, controversial, stories. A China correspondent interviewed dozens of business people and politicians to understand the yuan exchange rate, for example, and an economics editor probed the discontent in small-town America that ended up contributing to Trump’s presidential victory. The videos close with the tagline, “Real journalists and real news from America’s most trusted newspaper,” clearly taking aim at complaints of “fake news.”
Treading carefully
Even as some new organizations take stabs at weaving transparency into the culture of daily journalism, others appear wary of getting in too deep. Perhaps they fear exposing themselves to criticism; perhaps they are simply naïve about the need for scrutiny. This American Life published its seven-part S-Town podcast on a beautifully illustrated website, but without much extra information, ignoring obvious ethical questions about how the piece was reported. For example, the reporter digs into the most personal aspects of the main character’s life, from his clock-restoring business to his tattoo habit to his sex life, after he commits suicide early in the series. Did the source fully realize, before his death, the extent to which his life would be probed and analyzed?
And CNN observed a code of silence around its retraction of a thinly sourced piece about Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund. Its explanation was one sentence: “That story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted.” The public was left guessing at what transpired, and Trump saw the incident as a personal triumph. Shortly after, he tweeted, “Wow. CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with three employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!” He also tweeted a video in which he tackled someone whose face was superimposed with a CNN logo. The caption read: “#FraudNewsCNN #FNN.”
A Washington Post analysis — which presumably took weeks of reporting — accomplished little in clarifying the situation. It’s possible that CNN did not want to become a political punching bag by revealing its inner workings. But that kind of attitude does not encourage credibility with the public. And if CNN — a newsroom with 4,000 employees worldwide — can’t stand up to scrutiny and criticism, then who can? The outlet should have grasped the bigger picture, and used the mistake as a way to foster understanding and trust with consumers. Instead, the episode bred confusion and uncertainty.
Transparency can come with pitfalls, of course. Journalists need to protect their sources, explaining their reporting processes without revealing sensitive information. The good news is that journalists are masters of communication. Every day, we gather stories of pain and conflict from around the world, and deliver them to the public. Surely, we can learn to reveal a bit of ourselves, too.
