The Citizen Journalism Manual…

5. Our challenge: the distrust of media

Published in

PacificEdge

5 min readJul 30, 2022

The less you know, the more you believe. — Bono

ONE OF THE CHALLENGES we face as citizen journalists is the distrust of news reported on both conventional and social media. We can put this down to a number of developments:

the appearance of ‘fake news’ that is fabricated (otherwise known as lies) and accusations by politicians and others that authentic news is fake, confusing people and reducing trust in the media

the misrepresentation of events in social media reposts, claiming they are something other than what they actually are, often to produce a particular spin or interpretation of events; this is common with reposted photographs that sometimes turn out to be of events other than what they claim to be
the use of alarming and misleading headlines to encourage people to click on a link — ‘clickbait’; the perpetrator is often paid for every click onto their website
made-up or misleading news reports and attention-grabbing headlines used by people selling stuff so as to attract viewers to their websites; this is less about news and more about marketing
selective reporting and deliberate spin given to a story by less-reputable tabloid press news organisations
the distortion of news by government to achieve political and geostrategic objectives, such as by the government of Russia and organisations including the troll farms working for it; see the NATO Defence College’s The Handbook of Russian Information Warfare
and more.

Films about journalism have formed public perceptions about the profession, some good, others misleading. Medium Cool was a 1970s Paramount film centred around TV news journalists. All the President’s Men was the story of the investigative journalism that documented the Watergate break-in and the start of the decline of the Nixon administration. The 2017 film, The Post, dramatised the Washington Post’s controversial publishing of The Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s. Fourth Estate: The NY Times and Trump is a documentary about how the New Your Times reported Trump over his first year. Graphic: Distributed on Social media. © Paramount Pictures.

Distrust of online and social network news

A June 2017 Sensis report identified the extent of distrust in online and social network news sources.

The survey found:

82% trust in traditional news sources such as radio, TV and print media
12% trust in news sources on social media
7% trust in posts from friends or family posting to social media.

Meeting the challenge

Trust in mainstream news sources can in part be attributed to the historic role these organisations have had as the only sources of news and information through the Twentieth Century. That built an impetus that continues long after the reputation of some mainstream organisations became tainted by selective and biased reporting. Some of the long-established news organisations continue to retain trust, such as the New Your Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and others.

The role of investigative journalism once practiced by some mainstream media organisations, such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s revelation of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, and the role of The Washington Post and New York Times in revealing it, reinforced the positive reputation of mainstream media, especially the big-circulation, established newspapers as trustworthy, although for some that trust has been eroded by politically-motivated allegations of fake news in recent times.

While many news organisations continue to report fairly and accurately, the selective reporting of some has been eroding public trust in mainstream media organisations for some years. With public trust of online media low, educating people to become information-literate and ask questions about what they see in mainstream, online and specialist media becomes important. The role of debunking and myth busting websites becomes more important in a situation of media mistrust and the spread of disinformation

Trust can different for specialist news sources. Look online, and we find a multiplicity of news organisations and bloggers reporting specialist areas such as technology, science, digital culture, economics and so on. These employ writers who have experience and deep knowledge of what they write about and who produce informative, knowledgable and authoritative analysis, opinion and reportage. The same happens with independent specialist bloggers whose work is grounded in experience and knowledge.

For citizen journalists, especially those setting up their own websites, it is the specialist media with its authoritative bloggers that is the model. Writing based on what we know about, what our experience teaches us, and writing blogs that come across as reasonable, accurate and that present verifiable facts lend a tone of authenticity and honesty to our work.

Doing this, we position ourselves in a niche in the blogsphere and, through participating on relevant social media and engaging with commenters as well as commenting on others’ blogs, we start to become known.

A fractured media

We see that the media space in Australia is fractured. Old media of print and broadcast persist and have morphed into online news sources. Specialist sources produced by authoritative bloggers cater for specialist readers.

Although online media played a role in the closure of some newspapers and is responsible for falling newspaper sales and a decline of newspaper revenue through co-opting much of the classified advertisement market, print newspapers continue to supply news to a lot of people. A similar decline was predicted for print books with the appearance of ebook publishing. Even though many people prefer ebooks (and magazines) mainly because of their portability, there remains market for printed editions.

What we see here is not one form of publication forcing the other out of business, we see a diversification of media platforms which leads to a reduction in publishing numbers for some and an increase for others.

Surveys by media analysts point to a confused landscape when it comes to trust in the media. For we bloggers, this underlines the importance of being seen as a credible source of information. How to do that is what we look at in following chapters.