Would You Trust a Fact-Checking Journalist? Should You?

Philosophy Has the Answer

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Why We Need Journalists

Where do you get your news?

For most of us, it will be newspapers, television, radio, websites. These are all places that employ journalists to present the facts and to shape the discourse.

We’re into the swing of Presidential elections in the US, with all of the cut and thrust between politicians and journalists. Sometimes, the candidates don’t like the ways that journalists engage with them. But there’s no getting away from the fact that journalists do incredibly important work.

Elsewhere, even though we may not be at the same point in the electoral cycle, claims and counter claims are made in the press every single day.

We need journalists to help us fact-check the dizzying array of information that passes into our feeds. Journalists act as our filters and our guides.

Do we trust them?

But a recent study in Communication Research paints a worrying picture of the current state of affairs in journalism.

“Journalism currently faces a crisis of confidence (Strömbäck et al., 2020). Polls have reported historically low levels of trust in the media (Brenan, 2023; Pew Research Center, 2018, 2022), with trust declining since the 1970s and growing worse since then (Usher, 2018). Former United States President Donald Trump referred to the media as “the enemy of the people” (Carlson et al., 2021). A common refrain among spreaders of misinformation is that mainstream journalists are agenda-pushing liars (e.g., Beres et al., 2023; Corner, 2017). People are concerned that journalistic coverage is biased, sensationalized, and generally dishonest (see Fisher et al., 2021 for review).”

Against that backdrop, it is surely vital that journalists can both build trust and provide any necessary fact checks when they encounter falsehoods. However, Stein and Mayersohn, the authors of the Communication Research study, suggest that journalists face a difficulty in trying to do both things.

I won’t walk through the details of the studies, though I do recommend reading it in full. The headline finding is pretty striking though.

“Based on the premise that corrections, compared to confirmations, are more negative and cue more suspicion, we hypothesized that people are generally trusting of journalists providing confirmations but are relatively distrusting of journalists providing corrections. Two studies and one replication supported this hypothesis.” (Stein and Mayersohn, p. 22)

I was surprised when I read this: people distrust journalists who provide corrections? That’s a huge deal — and to me very surprising.

Trust, or….?

Now, when I read a study like this, I cut to the methods. I’m a philosopher with an interest in trust. If you’re going to tell me that some scenarios build trust and others generate distrust, I want to check on whether what you’re talking about is really trust at all.

(Think of the stereotype about philosophers asking ‘what do you mean when you say….’: yep, that’s me. And, in this case, I’m really not sure whether we’re talking about distrust.)

I read the supplementary materials to try to get into the details of the study. You can find them here. The basic idea Stein and Mayersohn used was to see how readers rate the author of the fact check and to then see whether the fact-check leads to the author being distrusted. And, as above, Stein and Mayersohn say that a fact check does lead to an increase in distrust.

Now, here comes the catch. Section 1.2 in the downloadable document gives the following conditions as being the measures of distrust.

1. The author of the fact check presented information he or she knew was not true.
2. The writer of the fact check is not presenting a full picture of the story.
3. The writer of the fact check quoted on this page has an ulterior motive.
4. The writer of the fact check has an agenda.

But I don’t think that a study that relies on 1–4 can definitively show anything much about distrust. Work in the philosophy of trust and distrust can explain why.

The Philosophy of Trust

The paper I want to draw on here is by Katherine Hawley. In her fantastic 2014 paper “Trust, Distrust and Commitment,” Hawley makes the (correct) point that distrust is rarely just general. It isn’t an all or nothing matter. I might distrust my better half to save me the last of the bottle of wine, but happily I do trust her to do lots of other things!

So, when we’re talking about distrust we really need to be thinking and talking in a more fine-grained way. What do we distrust people to do? If we don’t move to that level of precision, we invite each respondent to make up their own context and think about the question in their own way. That really isn’t a helpful thing to do and gives us a super-messy measure. To me, that’s a lot of complication for a study like Stein and Mayersohn’s.

But the second point that Hawley makes is even more pressing here. Hawley (2014: 10) explains that:

To distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that commitment.

So, going back to my wife: if I distrust her to save me the last of the wine, I must therefore think she has a commitment to saving me the last of the wine (maybe she promised), and yet not rely upon her to do so (perhaps I buy some more wine just for myself; experience has taught me well…).

The trouble, of course, is that Stein and Mayersohn are not measuring that with their four questions.

Instead, what they seem to be measuring is whether or not the respondents think fact-checking journalists are without motive and are honest. And that’s just not the same thing. So I am really not at all sure they really are measuring distrust.

Now, ok, for all I know, if they’d run the same experiments with my preferred questions, they might have found the same results. It really might turn out that journalists who fact-check are more distrusted (to do something) than those that do not.

But I don’t think they’ve yet shown that to be the case, because they’re not actually measuring distrust, but some nearby notions like honesty. So, we should be agnostic at this point.

So What Should We Do?

More pressing, though, is what we should do. Let’s just assume that everything I’ve said is right. So what? When a journalist fact-checks a claim, what should we ask ourselves when it comes to distrust?

Remember that, according to Hawley, to distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that commitment.

Building on that, here is a recipe for action:

1. Decide what the action is. What is it that you might be distrusting the journalist to do?
2. Decide what commitments you think the journalist has to doing that thing
3. Decide whether you would, in light of the evidence, rely upon the journalist to do that thing.

How you answer those questions determines whether you distrust the journalist to do that action.

A concrete case might be helpful, to illustrate.

1. The action is having done enough research about a topic to be informed enough to write about it. So, ‘Do I trust the journalist to have done the research to know enough about the subject matter to write a fair article about it?’
2. What commitments to doing the necessary research do I think the journalist has?
3. In light of the evidence, would I rely upon the journalist to know enough about the subject matter to write a fair article about it?

If I think that the journalist does have some commitments to doing the work, but I would not rely upon them to do so, then I distrust them. If I would still rely upon the journalist to know enough to write the article, then I trust them to do so.

If Hawley is right, then that’s all that there is to it and that’s something from contemporary philosophy we can all use when we’re considering who to trust and who to distrust.

Philosophy: applied

I’m biased; I’m a philosopher. So maybe you should expect this, but I love philosophy. And this is a case where I love the fact that contemporary philosophy can be used to generate tangible steps that we can take to guide us.

When it comes to thinking about trust, we should use philosophical insights to shape our interactions with the world. Our interactions with journalistic writings is an excellent place to start.

Philosophy often gets a bad reputation, sometimes being accused of not having ‘real-world’ applications. I think it’s clear that it does. There are concrete steps that we’ve drawn from the philosophical research to help guide how we can think about who we trust and what we trust them to do.

Is it all just footnotes to Plato? Maybe. But they’re good footnotes.

References

• Beres D., Walker J., Remski M. (2023). Conspirituality: How new age conspiracy theories became a health threat. New York, NY: Public Affairs.
• Brenan M. (2023, October 19). “Media confidence in U.S. matches 2016 record low.” Gallup.
• Carlson M., Robinson S., Lewis S. C. (2021). “Digital press criticism: The symbolic dimensions of Donald Trump’s assault on US journalists as the ‘enemy of the people’.” Digital Journalism, 9(6), 737–754.
• Corner J. (2017). “Fake news, post truth and media-political change.” Media, Culture & Society, 39(7), 1100–1107.
• Fisher C., Flew T., Park S., Lee J. Y., Dulleck U. (2021). “Improving trust in news: Audience solutions.” Journalism Practice, 15(10), 1497–1515.
• Hawley, K. (2014), “Trust, Distrust and Commitment.” Noûs, 48: 1–20.
• Pew Research Center. (2018). Journalism & Media. Consulted on August 13, 2024.
• Pew Research Center. (2022). Trust in America: Do Americans trust the news media? Consulted on August 13, 2024.
• Stein, R., & Meyersohn, C. E. (2024). “Whose Pants Are on Fire? Journalists Correcting False Claims are Distrusted More Than Journalists Confirming Claims.” Communication Research, 0(0).
• Strömbäck J., Tsfati Y., Boomgaarden H., Damstra A., Lindgren E., Vliegenthart R., Lindholm T. (2020). “News media trust and its impact on media use: Toward a framework for future research.” Annals of the International Communication Association, 44(2), 139–156.
• Usher N. (2018). “Re-thinking trust in the news: A material approach through “Objects of Journalism.” Journalism Studies, 19(4), 564–578.