Which Publications Can Americans Trust?
In Abridge’s last post (Let’s End Our Political Shouting Matches), we asked for ideas and suggestions from our early readers. By far, the most common suggestion we received was to include a trustworthiness rating beside each of the publications that we include in our daily social media topics. This feedback came from both liberals and conservatives. This suggestion is a good one and it’s not too surprising. Today, technology has enabled more publications than ever before, and both low and high quality articles spread like wildfire. As a reader, it can be difficult to separate quality publications from clickbait and “fake news”.
We at Abridge News have spent a lot of time thinking about how to assess and communicate the trustworthiness of different news sources, but we always come back to one core issue:
Liberals and conservatives fundamentally disagree on which news sources to trust.
And typically, both sides will immediately disregard an opinion or article that comes from a news site they don’t approve of.
An excellent report from the Pew Research Center for Journalism and Media paints a clear picture of this. Below, we’ve included our favorite chart from the report. The data shows trustworthiness ratings for 36 popular news sources as assessed by people who consider themselves consistently liberal, mostly liberal, mixed, mostly conservative, and consistently conservative.
Here are our main takeaways:
- Consistent liberals trust two-thirds of the popular publications included in the report
- Consistent conservatives are more skeptical: they only trust 8 of the 36 mainstream publications in the report
- Consistent conservatives distrust nearly all the publications that consistent liberals trust
- The sources that conservatives do trust are those that are distrusted most by liberals. For instance, 84% of consistent conservatives get weekly news from Fox News, but 81% of consistent liberals distrust Fox News
Our Abridge News team wants to help Americans engage in more thoughtful and empathetic political dialogue. In line with this goal, we need to appeal equally to conservative and liberal readers. We can only do this if we include news sources that conservatives trust AND news sources that liberals trust. This means that sometimes, we may highlight an opinion or editorial article from a news source that conservatives or liberals fundamentally disapprove of. And we think that’s okay.
That’s because we carefully assess each of the opinions and editorials that we highlight. Even if a publication is deemed to be worthy of distrust (by one or both sides), we make sure that the articles we share are not misleading or based on false facts. We stand by our promise to highlight interesting, logical, and valid opinions on different sides of a debate.
We are still considering whether we want to add a trustworthiness rating beside each of our featured publications. However, if we do this, we want to make sure that we get it right.
It would be easy for our readers to confuse the trustworthiness rating of a publication with the trustworthiness of an opinion or editorial that we highlight, and we don’t want this to happen. Most importantly, we want to make sure any potential rating does not alienate liberals OR conservatives.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this topic — send us a message on our Facebook account or comment below. And we would greatly appreciate it if you could click on the ‘heart’ icon on this page so that more people can read this and provide critiques. Thanks, as always, for your support!
We are making fast progress on our full web application and can’t wait to share it with you!
Check out our website, https://abridgenews.com, and sign up to be notified when our application launches. In the meantime, follow our Facebook and Instagram accounts to see our daily news topics — each day, we highlight four opposing op-eds on a trending story.
