All Media Trust is Not Created Equal

Media Industry and Consumers  Trust 

This article originally appeared in the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology newsletter. To subscribe to this newsletter, click here.

By Janet Coats, Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology Managing Director

Jeff Bezos cited the decline in trust in the news media as a reason to eliminate presidential endorsements at The Washington Post. But what exactly is “the media?”

“The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”

When I read this headline on Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ piece laying out his reasons for ending the paper’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates, my reaction was a bit profane.

I’ll paraphrase: No duh, Sherlock.

My job is to understand the factors contributing to the epidemic of distrust in American (and global) public life and work on interventions that can help mitigate it. It is work that can be utterly depressing with just enough glimmers of hope to keep me from despair.

Bezos isn’t wrong that surveys show a steady decline when it comes to trust in “the media.” But we have to dig deeper than that glib and obvious statement. What media don’t they trust, and why don’t they trust them?

Let’s begin with this important point from Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University who writes the blog Media Nation. Kennedy said on Threads that “people do trust the media that they use – otherwise they wouldn’t use it.”

Bezos references the annual Gallup poll on trust in political and civic institutions, released Oct. 14. When asked about their trust in mass media, 33% of respondents said they did not have very much confidence in mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” compared to 31% who expressed a great deal or fair amount of confidence.

Dire, right? But the key word there is “mass.” A word I would argue that very few people understand or could define. All journalism frequently gets lumped into “mass media,” which is by its nature fragmented and subject to cherry-picking news that matches your particular ideology. Love and trust that news, hate and distrust the rest.

But let’s look at a Pew Research Center survey from May of this year focused on local news. In it, 85% of respondents believe that local news are, at minimum, somewhat important to the well-being of their communities; 44% say it is extremely or very important. And 71% say that their local journalists are doing a good job of reporting news in their communities accurately.

That’s right: 71%. The finding that really heartens me is the gap in trust among political parties is much smaller than it is when looking at national news organizations and hasn’t changed much since 2018.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of work to do to build trust in local news. National political issues have infiltrated local issues, and that is making it tougher for reporters who work in communities that are either very political divided or deeply, deeply partisan in a particular direction. Joy Mayer, the director of Trusting News, both thinks deeply about these issues and works daily to help newsrooms in their efforts to build trust. She reminds us to remember “that the public does NOT automatically know about how news outlets operate – and that we should be explaining.” There remains a lack of understanding about ownership structures, who makes the calls in newsrooms and the line between news and opinion.

There’s a lot that went wrong at The Washington Post around the question of whether to endorse a presidential candidate. I think there are good, journalistically sound arguments to be made on both sides when it comes to national candidate endorsements. Local endorsements are more essential, I’d argue, because people don’t have time to do the research on a multitude of candidates and issues. That’s work your local news organization is well-equipped to do, and it can people understand how to engage in civic life. Sadly, fewer and fewer are making endorsements anymore; some have dispensed with editorial pages all together.

No matter the position a news organization takes, transparency is vital. We should give our readers and viewers the “why and how” of how we do our journalism. It may not make them like our approach more, but at least they have the information they need to evaluate whether our process can be trusted.

Posted: October 31, 2024
Insights Categories: Media Industry and Consumers, Trust
Tagged as: Janet Coats, Media Trust, The Washington Post