Whenever I speak with an audience of non-journalists, as I did recently, the first question is almost invariably about trust, and why or whether newsrooms have lost it. I have seen the same surveys you have about lost trust in all of our major institutions, including the press, but I think this subject is more complicated and less well understood than it should be. This week I want to talk about why that is the case, and how we might think about trust in journalism more productively.
First, the lack of trust in news seems to me very much analogous to the lack of trust in the Congress, in this sense: very few Americans trust the Congress, polls invariably show, but when individual members of the House stand for re-election, the enormous majority (roughly 88%!) of them are re-elected, with the rates largely unchanged over the last half century. ...
Here’s the analogy with news: while trust in the press generally has declined, if you look more closely at the surveys, people do tend to trust the news sources they actually choose to personally consume. This shouldn’t be that surprising: what’s the point of consuming news if you aren’t inclined to believe it? Better to read a novel, or a comic strip.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here