Why the Issues Around Newsrooms and Trust Aren’t Quite What You May Think

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

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.

What we share with Congress

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. (Indeed, the huge number of recent voluntary retirements from the House suggests that members may actually be losing trust in their work more than the voters are losing in them.)

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.

Institutions are the issue

This is not to say that there isn’t a trust problem in news; there is. We can see all around us that trust in institutions has declined, and the more a news organization feels to readers, listeners and viewers like an impersonal institution, the harder it is to sustain genuine engagement. Conversely, however—and this may be the essence of why content creators are having such a moment—the more newsrooms, or individual providers, come across as human beings offering both service and engagement, the more audiences are receptive, even trusting.

 

The reaction to the recent murders of two civilians by ICE troopers in Minneapolis seem to me to offer some glimpses of hope in this arena, albeit in a terribly dark context. It is true that the Trump regime has lied easily, shamelessly and repeatedly about the killings, but polls make clear that the significant majority of Americans aren’t buying it. Instead, they are looking at the bystander videos (created by individual witnesses) for themselves, and at the careful work being done to analyze them by news organizations, from the Minnesota Star Tribune to Bellingcat to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and seeing the events for what they were.

I take hope from this not only because our fellow citizens are mostly coming to the truth despite the fog of lies from the regime in Washington, but also in how they are doing it: by looking for themselves at the best evidence yet available, and by responding positively to the painstaking efforts of great news organizations to sift through that evidence, carefully and transparently. To the extent that we can use these stories as a model for journalism in our time we will all—newsrooms and audiences alike—stand to benefit. Earlier work by Block Club Chicago and others on ICE’s Midway Blitz last Fall were harbingers of the same phenomenon.

Meeting the moment

How can we meet this moment more comprehensively? First, as editors are coming increasingly to understand, show your work, reveal everything about your sources that you reasonably can, elucidate your process, explain how your business model yields your reporting. I would have hoped this went without saying, but don’t try to BS your readers (or your staff, including on notes they will share with readers) as the Washington Post leadership did yesterday in trotting out another tired exhortation from a declining legacy paper ostensibly determined to do more with less.

Returning to the positive, if a reporter brings unusually relevant experience to a story, write it in the first person—while resisting the impulse to make the story about us. (Remember that most first-person narratives are not memoirs.) Make sure you are in touch with what readers, listeners and viewers still feel they don’t know enough about, what they still want explained, what they need in order to act as they wish to. Don’t omit that kind of information even if you reported it once in a paragraph, or even a whole story, a day or a week or a month ago.

Create multiple versions of what you produce, so as to meet people where they are. I heard someone recently refer to content as increasingly “liquid,” by which I think they meant it could be poured into different containers, shapes, amounts and forms. AI can make this process far more efficient, and the necessary safeguards against error are easy to effect. If you’re reluctant to use these new tools in this way, because of your own queasiness or the fears of others in your newsroom, you’re making a mistake.

One perhaps more controversial point about how to gain trust, to which I already adverted above. Please don’t focus on your own trauma, or that of your colleagues, in reporting on the principal trauma suffered by others. By this, I do not mean for a moment to deny that doing our jobs these days is sometimes very hard. It surely is, and newsroom leaders need to attend to this sensitively and generously.

But when people are being wantonly shot in the head by agents of the government, or children are being separated from parents and detained without cause, or older people are being dragged nearly naked through the snow, it does not establish trust with those who depend on us to focus on our own far less egregious wounds. Our aim should be to engender empathy with the subjects of our coverage, not first sympathy for ourselves.

The age breakdown and what it means

All of these steps are especially important because, even after controlling for partisan effects, trust in news (and much else) is lower among people under 50. In other words, the break on trust comes roughly between Gen X and Millenials, and is a phenomenon of people now already in mid-life, not just the young. Not coincidentally, I think, this is the broad age cohort whose news consumption has almost entirely occurred during the digital age.

My own guess about why less trust is extended by those born after the mid-Seventies is not that print delivery has declined so much, but that news sources (and thus choices) exploded as these people came of age. In this explosion, as we often note in other contexts, opinion offerings (admittedly like this one) proliferated, while the resulting business crisis meant that the resources devoted to original reporting contracted. That many in journalism responded by blurring the line between news and opinion hardly helped.

Nothing we can currently foresee seems likely to reverse these trends anytime soon. In that sense, purely through the operation of demographics (a polite word for what happens to old people), the trust problem in journalism is almost certain to grow. It merits our attention, but in a way that is thoughtful and even nuanced.

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