Why journalists’ understanding of their communities should include conservatives

As journalists work to build knowledge and insight about the people they serve, it’s worthwhile to look at how people’s values and worldview affect their perceptions of the news.

Research tells us Americans can’t agree on which national news sources are trustworthy. We know Democrats trust a variety of news sources, Republicans trust few — and they consider their anti-media attitudes to be a core part of their political identity.

We know national distrust of the news trickles down to local communities. While trust in local news is higher than trust in national news — even among conservatives — local journalists say they feel like they’re facing an uphill battle to demonstrate their credibility and ethics to many communities across America. Journalists also say they are sometimes in the dark about what elements of their coverage feel out of step with or irrelevant to people in their communities.

With our “Re-engaging the Right” interview project, we’re partnering with newsrooms to gain insight into how conservatives see the news (with a built-in acknowledgment that no political group is monolithic). Trusting News is a solutions-focused project. Our work is always aimed at developing strategies that will improve the relationship journalists have with the people they aim to serve.

Read more about this work, a collaboration with the Center for Media Engagement, in this post.

As we check in with the journalists working with us on this project, we’re hearing from them that the people they interviewed feel oversimplified by news coverage. As a teaser, here is one quick reflection from a newsroom partner, Arnessa Garrett of the Dallas Morning News.

We are building on these interviews with a larger initiative:

From Journalism to Pluralism: Helping journalists re-engage communities across the political spectrum through coverage that reflects diverse values, fuels open-mindedness and fosters productive conversation.

We’ll have more on the next steps for the initiative soon. At its core, it will be about empowering journalists to build trust across a wide range of communities and belief systems.

Because so much of how we understand American life right now is seen through a political lens, we are taking a deeper dive into how political views and values shape perceptions of news. We know people are complex and have a variety of reasons for the ways they shape their own media diet. While being careful not to oversimplify, we also want to focus on one defined group that has starkly diminishing trust in news — Republicans / conservatives / right-leaning adults. Our goal is not to uphold a political system but to use this as an entry point to better understand the multiple attitudes and perspectives that motivate distrust.

I want to be clear that this is not a zero-sum game. The skills used to understand any group of people should be applied to other groups. And at a time of racial reckoning, the idea of trying to understand people who lean right cannot and should not come at the expense of understanding other communities that have trust issues with the press, particularly people of color. (More on that below.)

I also want to be clear that this project is not specifically about political coverage. It’s about how people feel their values, beliefs, cultures, families and identities are — or are not — understood and reflected by journalists in general.

We want to hear from people who pay a lot of attention to politics and policy coverage and those who do not. We want to better understand what highly engaged news consumers think and what casual news consumers think. And we’re just as interested in how people feel about coverage of religion, health, crime, arts and schools as we are in assessing political coverage.

Can we, as journalists, agree it’s problematic that people with specific political leanings don’t believe we’re trying to tell the truth with integrity? Can we also agree the reasons for that will involve both the public’s misunderstandings of journalism and journalists’ misunderstandings of the public? Can we agree there is benefit in surfacing insights on both sides of the relationship?

We believe journalists have a vital opportunity and a profound responsibility to meet this moment with curiosity, humility and determination.

As we begin this project, we welcome questions and feedback about our plans. What should we keep in mind? What should we read? Who should we talk to? Email joy@TrustingNews.org. And if you’re a journalist who would like to get involved in future work around trust across the political spectrum, let us know here. We’ll be in touch.

This work deserves thought and care

We’re striving to undertake this work with nuance and thoughtfulness. Here’s what we’re committed to:

• We will be cautious with labels. Putting people in buckets meant to summarize their political views is dangerous. And we’re mindful that any extreme view is in the minority. Gallup polling continues to show there are more people who identify as independent than either Democrat or Republican. That said, we will sometimes (like in the headline on this post!) use words like conservative or liberal as a stand-in for more complex concepts.
• Likewise, we will separate ideas from voting behavior. Who or what someone selects on a ballot does not encompass everything they believe in or stand for.
• We will look for diversity and complexity in the interview responses. The people who filled out our survey and agreed to be interviewed by our partner journalists represent a range of political viewpoints, and we’ll be looking for nuance in the body of responses. And while those people skewed overwhelmingly white, we encouraged our newsroom partners to reflect diversity of race and ethnicity as much as possible.
• We will continue to hold journalists accountable for earning trust more generally. Our work will continue in other areas — on matters of ethics, revenue, transparency and engagement. For professional journalists, student journalists and educators. With BIPOC communities. With communities big and small, rural and urban, in red states and blue states.

The basic problem we’re addressing

First, let’s revisit the reason we feel this work is especially needed. As we wrote a few months ago, there’s no ignoring the huge distrust among people who identify as Republican. They report feeling mocked and misunderstood by political journalism. And they perceive bias in coverage of non-political life more generally. Conservatives increasingly feel like the news is not made for people like them or by people like them.

Part of our core responsibility is to be truth tellers and sense makers, and we can’t do that if we’re not being heard by a large segment of our communities. Our impact is limited if we’re seen as a part of a polarized society rather than a moderator of conversations and a documenter of life across a variety of perspectives.

Healthy democracies depend on civic dialogue and a shared set of facts. Our team at Trusting News believes local news especially can play an important role in bridging conversations across political divides. Our goal is to better understand the societal and psychological forces that influence polarization and perceptions of news.

As we’ve said for years in our work with newsrooms, we can wish people had more trust in our work. But wishes don’t change the situation. It’s vital that we understand obstacles to trust so we can demonstrate our credibility and integrity in a way that is persuasive. It’s also vital that we acknowledge the harm we’ve caused and ways we’ve fallen short so we can move forward from a place of humility and shared purpose. We have to earn the right to host a community’s conversation or tell a community’s stories. And it’s just about impossible to do that if we’re seen as the enemy.

The work we want journalists to do will involve transparency and engagement strategies to explain and defend the integrity and credibility of journalism.

It will involve self-reflection about how we as journalists actually contribute to polarization by reinforcing binary positions, oversimplifying complex views and fueling outrage by focusing on extreme characters.

It will also include a look at the ways journalists bring our own assumptions and worldview to our work — in ways that are necessary and/or problematic, and both accidental and by choice.

The huge number of conservatives who don’t trust the news — and our country’s diminishing skill at talking across divides — is bad for democracy. And the lack of trust is of course also bad for journalism’s sustainability, since people don’t pay for news they don’t trust. As an editor at a newspaper in a red state said to me last year, if she doesn’t figure out how to be relevant to more of her potential audience, she won’t survive.

In this post from December, we listed some questions we’d like to address with local journalists, including:

• Are we aware enough of the diversity of political thought (or lack of it) in our newsrooms (and our Twitter feeds)?
• Are we talking about any implicit political bias that might be present and how to acknowledge and compensate for it?
• Are we considering how issues of bias are perceived not just in political journalism but in the ways we describe and reflect different perspectives on life in general?
• Are we willing to talk about our values as journalists and the value we offer our communities (and democracy)? Are we willing to tell a story about our ethics and integrity in a way that is compelling and authentic?

Newsrooms typically have far more liberals on staff than conservatives — in opinion sections, where it is most acknowledged and visible, but also on the news side. We too often exist within our own filter bubbles, with friend networks and Twitter feeds that confirm our own views. That’s not something we as an industry collect data on or would typically acknowledge, even internally. (Here are some startling stats from 2013.) But it’s important that we address it.

In addition to a large number of journalists being liberal and being friends with other liberals, there’s another divide worth mentioning: the one between news junkies and everyone else. Journalists’ immersion in the news is not typical, and we too often assume our audiences have the same urge to stay informed. Many of them do not.

The intersection of race and politics

Journalists have a lot of work to do when it comes to building trust with communities of color. That includes taking a hard look at past and present content, and at the diversity of newsroom staff. White supremacy is a pervasive, destructive force in the United States. Journalists need to document it and raise awareness about it. They also need to address the ways they are complicit in perpetuating racist and discriminatory viewpoints, which requires a humility that does not usually come naturally.

One newsroom came to Trusting News recently asking for advice about building trust with people of color in their community. The staffers were clear-eyed and had good ideas about both content and community outreach. When they pitched their ideas, management was defensive and unwilling to understand the depth of the harm conventional news coverage had done to people of color. That lack of humility doomed the effort from well-intentioned staffers. This was a good reminder that with any trust-building effort, we need to start with our eyes wide open about the problem and our own role in it. (Letrell Deshan Crittenden had a great piece in CJR this week that provided a rubric newsrooms can use to assess their efforts. I wrote about how I hope newsrooms use it.)

Too often, people of color in newsrooms bear the burden of holding that mirror up for their newsrooms. They are called on to cover certain stories and educate their colleagues about diversity, and then their ability to keep their own experiences separate from their journalism is called into question when they are needed most.

Our team will continue to work with journalists on listening and outreach efforts with communities of color. We have ongoing conversations with partner newsrooms about things like:

• committing to outreach efforts that are respectful, generative and authentic, not performative
• building community and hosting conversations around racial justice
• taking ownership over comment moderation to demonstrate intolerance for racist attacks
• being transparent about efforts to address staff diversity
• considering ways to bring more voices into the newsroom, through things like source tracking, advisory boards and opinion writing

We also recognize that our work reaching out to people who politically lean right will not feel appropriate to all journalists. We know some journalists will not feel able or willing to participate in outreach efforts that might give voice to racist views. And after the events of the last year especially, some people are keeping their outreach and coverage priorities focused on racial justice. The approach we’re taking of reaching out across divides could feel incongruous. We absolutely respect those hesitations.

We believe newsrooms need to be able to see their community with nuance and complexity and to routinely bring expanded understandings of their community into their coverage. That’s especially true if they serve a general audience — not one organized around specific demographics, worldviews or causes.

We also believe this work is vital to journalism’s ability to support racial justice. White people do not need to be able to see white supremacy to benefit from it. But they do need to be able to see how they benefit from their whiteness in order to effectively fight racism. Journalists committed to racial justice will have wider reach if they are heard by and accessible to white conservatives. We should aim to host conversations about race that include white people across the political spectrum.

What we can learn from depolarization and conflict work

Research tells us that partisan polarization is the primary motivator behind the sharing of fabricated political news on Twitter. As this study finds: “Individuals who report hating their political opponents are the most likely to share political fake news and selectively share content that is useful for derogating these opponents.”

Discouraging the sharing of fabricated content is something we can all get behind, right?

So, how do we keep from fueling hatred for political opponents? Let’s borrow from a strategy taught in a Braver Angels workshop on depolarization. When reading your characterization of a political position, would the rational and well-intentioned people who hold those views feel both respected and understood? Or would they feel mocked or misrepresented?

Accurate representations of someone’s views are built on listening well, with a desire to truly understand. And our ability to empathize with other views requires the belief that there are reasonable, good people who hold those views.

In another Braver Angels workshop format, politically “red” and “blue” participants spend a good chunk of time in separate breakout rooms coming up with just four questions to ask each other across the divide.

“It takes time because asking truly curious, open-minded questions of people you suspect or have judgments about is really challenging,” said Mónica Guzmán, Director of Digital and Storytelling at Braver Angels and a longtime journalist herself.

“The hardest part? Stripping out the underlying assumptions from your questions so when you ask them, people aren’t too distracted by those assumptions to answer.”

Eve Pearlman is co-founder of Spaceship Media, a dialogue journalism project launched after the 2016 election with a goal of reducing polarization, building communities and restoring trust in journalism. As she said in her team’s book, Guns, An American Conversation: How to Bridge Political Divides, their goal is not to change minds but to encourage listening, shed partisan talking points, and use journalism to foster civil conversation. “We think of building a triangle of trust,” she wrote, “between divided communities and the journalists who serve them.”

Our team at Trusting News looks forward to learning from and collaborating with Braver Angels and Spaceship Media during this project.

What we can learn from understanding people’s values

What does it look like to make information accessible to people who are not inclined to trust it?

We can take some inspiration from this guide to vaccine communication, from researchers at the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. I have done some training with them on these ideas, adapting general communication principles for journalists. The foundation of the work is an understanding of vaccine hesitancy because communicators can’t be persuasive if they don’t understand the nature of the hesitancy.

If our goal is to communicate facts effectively, it does no good to label wary Americans as anti-science. We have an opportunity instead to avoid shame and stigma. To understand the values behind the views. To be thoughtful about which expert voices we elevate based on who is likely to be found credible.

How our values influence our perceptions of news is the topic of recent research from the Media Insight Project, a joint venture of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. (Trusting News is co-hosted by API and the Reynolds Journalism Institute.) The study builds on Moral Foundations Theory, which looks at how people respond to core values such as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity, and layers on perceptions of journalistic values.

The majority of Americans aren’t inclined to fully embrace some basic tenets that drive journalism, such as the importance of shining a light on societal problems, monitoring people in power and making secret things public. And that lack of support tracks to survey participants’ basic values, more than it does to their political leanings.

Rather than accepting the simple explanation that Democrats trust the news and Republicans don’t, we need to make the story of journalism more complicated by continuing to listen and learn, and responding to what we hear. And we need to look for the underlying reasons and motivations behind people’s views and not settle for oversimplified assumptions about partisan politics.

Through this work, perhaps we’ll learn that partisanship is not the main issue but one that ties several criticisms of the press together. Perhaps we’ll start with “the right” but work to develop a set of themes — from social values to policy priorities — that drive attitudes.

In the new book “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out,” Amanda Ripley writes about making an idea “hearable.” It involves understanding the other side’s moral language so you can acknowledge where they’re coming from and communicate in a way that will be accessible. (Ripley’s 2018 piece, Complicating the Narratives should be required reading for every journalist.)

This concept of making something hearable is relevant for how journalists talk about their work. It’s ineffective to assume that our messaging about holding powerful people accountable will resonate with everyone, and it’s worth our time to explore other frames (for example when asking for subscriptions). It’s also true for how journalists describe issues they cover. Being able to address something from the perspective of different moral values will make the ideas more hearable.

Think about the argument that people who “don’t believe in facts” aren’t worth worrying about. Ask yourself this: If people have been fed a constant diet of misinformation, should journalists leave them to fend for themselves and hope they eventually see the light? Let them dig into their own information ecosystem and get lost in it? Give up on them as productive citizens? Or should journalists, as the vaccine research would recommend, meet them where they are and lay a path back to truth and facts?

Won’t a better understanding of audience views make fact-checking more effective?

What’s next?

Our hope is that these Re-engaging the Right interviews will help journalists develop a deeper understanding of what conservatives believe about the world, and about journalism. We look forward to sharing what the interviews reveal — a full report will be published this summer — and also sharing what our partner journalists say they learn from the experience. We hope to build a deeper understanding of the range of views held by the people we aim to serve.

That requires that we marry good intentions with deep listening. It also requires that we trust our communities enough to listen to them.

We are also planning industry conversations and trainings around reaching people across the political spectrum. We will bring in expertise from organizations that have been working in depolarization and hosting conversations across divides. We plan to help journalists with some honest self-assessments around their own biases and assumptions. If you’d like to be kept in the loop about our plans, let us know here.

In the meantime, here are some things we hope you’ll do in your journalism:

• Fuel more curiosity than outrage. Tell stories that make people want to hear more.
• Complicate the narrative. Avoid binary characterizations and easy labels.
• Characterize people and views in ways that make them feel respected and understood. That allows communities to disagree more honestly, based on generous characterizations of opposing views.

More resources

Here are some things we’re using and learning from:

• Braver Angels is an organization dedicated to helping Americans understand each other. Their podcast, newsletter and workshops have all been useful to us.
• “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out” is Amanda Ripley’s new book. It builds on themes you have seen in her 2018 piece, Complicating the Narratives.
• The Solutions Journalism Network has built on Ripleys’ essay with a Complicating the Narratives approach and curriculum. Check out this piece from Hélène Biandudi Hofer: How to do great journalism on polarizing issues instead of making things worse, and sign up for a webinar here.
• Here’s a version of the interview guide we’re using with our newsroom partners, to guide their conversations with community members who lean right. Feel free to take it out for a spin yourself, and please let us know how it goes if you do.

Thank you for reading.

Trusting News is designed to demystify the issue of trust in journalism. We research how people decide what news is credible, then turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We’re co-hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Read more about our work at TrustingNews.org.