If love isn’t an option, how about trust?
Elaine McKewon and Peter Fray surveyed the research landscape into trust in journalism. This is what they found
Most journalists don’t expect to be loved by an adoring, uncritical public. Which is just as well. They aren’t.
But given journalists are supposedly working on the public’s behalf, shouldn’t they at least expect to be trusted?
Isn’t that a baseline requirement for an effective fourth estate?
Sadly, for many people, journalism is now on the nose. Journalism’s audiences are feeling alienated, unloved even.
It is true that trust in several institutions is in free-fall. But journalism’s trust crisis is pressing, urgent, perhaps existential.
In darker moments, it can feel as if the whole idea could collapse under the weight of presidential slurs, government attempts to criminalise journalists and incessant spread of misinformation masquerading as news media on social platforms.
But failure is not an option. How does the news media industry regain the trust of the people? First, we need to better understand the problem.
The Centre for Media Transition is seeking to answer the question: what would it take for audiences to trust journalists again?
We are not alone in attempting to do so. We have assessed the current state of knowledge on public trust in journalism in dozens of countries and geopolitical regions around the world.
We searched a cross-section of literature including public opinion polls and surveys, peer-reviewed academic studies and perspectives from the journalistic field.
So, what did we find? You might like to have a look for yourself at Public Trust in Journalism — An Annotated Bibliography.
But before you follow the link and take a deep dive, we’d like to offer a few observations.
1. Research on public trust in journalism is limited; numerous studies allude to the concept of trust but actually measure factors that influence public perceptions of news credibility.
2. Some studies point to a rise in trust in journalism. But that is obscured, if not overwhelmed, by declining trust in news media as an institution.
3. Surveys have a tendency to generalise the news media as a monolithic entity; yet even in a single media channel, there is an uneven distribution of trust and distrust in individual news organisations and sources.
4. There is a need to do more work.
On the academic front, a key point is emerging: researchers are moving away from a top-down approach — the academic as god, if you like — and are starting to actively engage and actually listen to what news audiences have to say. This can only be a good thing. But there is a way to go.
Research on trust in journalism has been dominated by quantitative studies. This may not be a surprise. Academics like measuring things. But such studies might well disappoint anyone looking for actual strategies to rebuild trust between journalism and society.
The most influential surveys that measure trust in journalism in Australia and internationally actually provide broad indicators of trust in ‘the media’ and other key social institutions. Unfortunately, these surveys and their respondents often conflate ‘quality’ journalism, tabloids, social media and fake news.
It is sometimes hard to work out what they even mean by journalism.
Despite efforts to refine their results (ranking trust in news organisations within single media channels, correlating trust and distrust with demographic and partisan groups, and breaking down trust in ‘the media’ into ‘journalism’ and ‘platforms’) these surveys tell us which way trust is trending — up or down — but cannot fully explain these trends.
The ‘whys’ are elusive, the answers even more so. This is perhaps the nature of the beast.
Fixation on measurement doesn’t do much to advance our understanding of the range of factors and complex processes by which consumers place trust in journalism, news organisations or individual media channels.
Moreover, as we mentioned above, the explanatory power of quantitative methods is fundamentally weakened by the top-down approach in which researchers often don’t clarify what is meant by ‘trust’, ‘media’ or ‘journalism’.
Are these terms that slippery?
Furthermore, many researchers tend to set in advance the words respondents are allowed to use to express ‘their own’ views. It is as if they don’t really trust the audience.
In light of these limitations, scholars are now reassessing the question of media trust. The emerging view: there is a need for new theoretical and methodological approaches focused on relational qualitative knowledge that explains the process by which audiences come to trust (or distrust) journalists and news organisations.
And how trust, once gained, can be maintained.
We see promise in the bottom-up, constructivist approach being deployed by several researchers, including ourselves. In such studies, participants are first asked to define, in their own words, the concepts of ‘news’ and ‘trust’ and then are asked to give their own reasons why they do or don’t trust news media.
The researchers are then able to drill deeper into these reasons with follow-up questions to gain deeper insights into the trust formation process and ways in which trust can be rebuilt.
Interestingly, one such study, conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford confirmed that public trust in journalism is not a story about credibility: it involves ‘feelings of a kind that accord the media a legitimate place in the social ordering of the world’.
Consumer expectations are driven by the need for news information that supports them in their personal and civic lives, provides a sense of assurance in an insecure world and offers distraction from the anxieties of the serious world.
Participants generally did not question the credibility of news information. On the other hand, their distrust is fuelled by a sense of alienation from the news media: for example, when people are told stories they don’t understand or when their own communities’ stories are told in ways that lack depth, sensitivity or fair representation.
The authors suggest that journalists launch a renewed ‘mission to connect’ via various linkages: between news stories and their background; between citizens and institutional decision-making processes; between people and the colossus of information they encounter online and offline; and between communities and other communities.
Bearing in mind the benefits of this approach, we’ve adopted it for our work, holding workshops using similar methods with news consumers in regional Australia and in Sydney. For updates on our results as they come to hand, watch this space. We’d also encourage the news media industry to get out and smell the trust — or lack thereof.
The centre’s mission is to generate knowledge that helps journalists rebuild trust with their audiences, adapt to technological change, stand their ground as watchdogs, hold power to account and continue to contribute to the healthy functioning of democracy.
We see our trust work as an essential part of this mission. If you would like to know more about our work or contact us, please visit the Centre for Media Transition’s website.
Peter Fray is co-director of the Centre for Media Transition at University of Technology Sydney. Elaine McKewon is a researcher with the CMT and the curator of the Public Trust in Journalism Annotated Bibliography.
The CMT’s trust work has received financial support from the Facebook’s APAC News Literacy project.
