i am one of the few honest people that i have ever known
How do people view media they come across in everyday life, and what can that tell us about why they do (and do not) trust the news they encounter? In early 2021, the Reuters Institute held a series of focus group discussions and interviews with cross-sections of people on four continents to learn more about the way people think about these matters. They told us about what they liked, what they disliked, and, most importantly, what they found trustworthy and untrustworthy about news, and why. [...]
Familiarity with brands and their reputations offline often shaped how people thought about news content online as well. Across all four countries, when people described what led them to trust or distrust news organisations, many used the term as a kind of shorthand for news sources they were familiar with and their sense of a given brand's reputation (good or bad). Conversations about trust would often lead to more general impressions about things people either liked or disliked about news media, which suggests the boundaries between a news source that is 'trusted' and a news source that is simply 'likeable' are often blurry. Brands can be cues for trust, but also for distrust. Both more trusting and less trusting individuals tended to articulate trust in this way. [...]
Editorial processes and practices of journalism were rarely central to how people thought about trust. Only a small number in each country expressed confidence in their understanding of how journalism works or the decision-making and newsgathering processes that shape how the news is made. Instead, many focused on more stylistic factors or qualities concerning the presentation of news as more tangible signals of perceived quality or reliability. [...]
One reason why actual practices of journalism were less central to how people seemed to think about trust may be because few expressed confidence in their knowledge about what reporting the news actually entails. Instead, they tended to rely on various heuristics or other cues about what might be decent proxies for professionalism and quality. [...]
Previous research in the US has shown considerable limits to the public's knowledge about basic journalistic practices (Media Insight Project 2018). We found similar gaps in understanding, which were often revealed in subtle ways. Study participants would refer, for example, to pop culture references when describing their sense of how the news works. Sticking with Henry (48, man, US), to take one example, when asked if he had a sense of 'what goes on day-to-day in terms of reporting the news', he responded by recalling the Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty . 'I'm just picturing how he would show up to a scene and there he'd have his camera crew and everything, and they'd report on something.' [...]
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