Expanding Definition of News Media Trust
Expanding the Definition of News Media Trust is a conversation led by Jay Rosen at the San Antonio Wake Up Call Conference. You can read the whole discussion at the conference’s Final Report page.
Here are experts from the conversation with Charles Lewis, Neil Chase, Dan Gillmor and Rosen:
Rosen, professor at New York University and blogger at PressThinK:
In the standard story that we hear, we find trust in the media declining and we look at poll numbers that show that, and we briefly ask, well, why would this be and we go down our list of factors and one of the factors is the recent spate of scandals like Jayson Blair and Dan Rather and other high-profile screw-ups, which must have done something to trust. And then we cite the fragmenting of the marketplace and the way that that is breaking apart the media empires of old, and that’s fracturing trust.
We talk about the loss of energy and initiative to bloggers, who are kind of nipping at the heels of the mass media. And we mention how criticism from the left and the right keeps rising, and that’s doing something to trust. And therefore, people in journalism are worried and they don’t really know what to do about it, but they’re trying to reconnect with their communities, and that’s the story. I’ve heard it hundreds of times.
That captures a certain portion of the situation, and it’s not wrong, it’s not incorrect. It’s just limited.
Charles Lewis, founder Center for Public Integrity, (A nonprofit doing investigative reporting):
I think that a lot of things that should be covered for ordinary citizens are not being covered, haven’t been covered for decades, and the way to either build trustâ¦is to present information about subjects that affect people’s daily lives in an unvarnished, no-holds-barred way that names names and lays out information that is relevant to their daily lives to the best you can, and document it to the extent that you can, and that’s what we’ve tried to do in 300 reports and 14 books at the Center.
Neil Chase, Deputy editor, NYTimes.com
What have I learned about trust from my years inside newsrooms and academia? All of us know, from our time inside newsrooms that most of the screw-ups are not an intentional plot by a group of scheming editors who sit around the table and make up a plan to screw something up. They are often just stupid mistakes. Somebody didnât raise a red flag. Somebody didn’t say, hey, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. Or, have we asked this question? Or you hear something at a dinner and you say, gee, that’s a story, and I’m the local newspaper, I should do that. A lot of it just comes back to doing our jobs.
Dan Gillmor, Author, “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” and the blog Bayosphere
The transparency question…is the change. It’s knowing that trust goes two ways, actually. If we trust the readersâ¦to help us, I think that we’ll find that they will. And that’s something that…took me a long time to get.
And the jury is way out on any number of things, including what business models will exist for citizens media, how we can encourage people to do things that are more signal than noise, and fundamentally, how I hope we can add this system and stop all this nonsense about replacing big mediaâwhen it does its job well, it does it brilliantly and we should want to keep it.
