FMC Fast Chat: Trust In News? In America? Let's Discuss

Ever wonder what it is about news today that makes Americans lose their minds? We asked the expert. This is the podcast from the Fair Media Council.

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

I'm Jaci Clement, and trust is the topic of today's Fast Chat, and in particular, whether or not you trust the news. So joining us is Dr. Benjamin Toff, who leads the Trusted News Project as a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And Ben is coming to us today from the University of Oxford, where he is based. Hey, Ben.

Hi.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining us. Can you just start out very simply by telling us what the Trusted News Project is and why do you do it?

Sure. So the Trusted News Project is a 3-year research project based out of the, as you mentioned, the Reuters Institute at Oxford. And the Reuters Institute has been studying news audiences, specifically digital news audiences around the world for many years now. And one of— one piece of the publications that they put out every year about, which is called the Digital News Report, has looked at trust. But they wanted to look at trust in a more in-depth way, you know, beyond just the few questions in any given survey that is typically used, and do so across multiple countries and using different research methods. And so they put together a grant to look at trust in news over a 3-year period. And we're focusing on the US, the UK, Brazil, and India, 4 countries with very different media environments, political environments, and doing this with a mix of different research methods. So both some in-depth interviewing, qualitative interviews, surveys as well, some experiments. And the goal is ultimately to try to figure out, you know, what seems to work, what doesn't work for news organizations in terms of building or sustaining trust with their audiences, and trying to get a better handle on what trust in news really means.

Okay. And I find it a little bit interesting with your background in that before you did this, you were a journalist yourself.

That's right. Yeah. I worked before, well, not just before this, but before I even went to graduate school. So before I went and got my PhD, which is in political science, I worked for about 6 years in journalism, most of the time at the New York Times. And then I started looking around thinking about what I, what I was interested in doing, which was really to focus on a subject, not necessarily this one in particular, but a research subject that interests me around news and media and politics and be able to focus on that in depth in a way that really only academic institutions like this allow people to do.

Let me start with really my basic question, which could probably take all 30 minutes for you to answer. But based on your background and your experience and from where you sit at Oxford with all of this data behind you, The question is, what is it about news today that just makes people lose their minds in America?

You know, part of it is how much the news media environment has changed. You know, we're in a very different world, as I think everybody knows, from, you know, a few decades ago where the sources of news available to people were so much more limited and more similar to each other. And so it is just much harder for people to navigate the environment because you're just inundated with lots of different kinds of information than before. And then the other part of it, I think, is not even about the news, but it's about the, um, the environment in the United States, which is so polarized, so divided, um, and so contentious. And news is very much caught up in all of those conversations. And so it doesn't really escape, um, you know, it doesn't escape from those conversations, escape from that contentiousness. So tell me, how do we compare in the United States compared to the other 3 countries involved in this Yeah, so we just put out our 3rd report last week, which is based on, as you mentioned, survey work that we did in all 4 countries. And one of the things that is striking in our data is how much more politically polarized trust in news is in the United States. So there are, you know, very clear political divides in all 4 countries. In the US, it's particularly along lines of partisanship. And it's just a wider gap and gulf really between people who identify with Democratic Party and people who identify with Republican Party and how that plays a role in their impressions of whether news is trustworthy. Part of that is, you know, some very prominent politicians in the US who've contributed to those perceptions about the press. Some of it is, you know, when people are thinking about news, they're thinking about cable news, which is very partisan and divided. And part of it is people's exposure to information, including news on social media, which is also very polarizing and partisan. And so all of that is really, I think, to a level even beyond what you see in other countries, just, just very much on display in the US.

So how do you measure trust? And I guess really the point of my question is, are we really looking at trust right now, or are we looking at distrust more than anything?

You know, that's something that we, we focused on this a little bit in our first report, but there is a difference between what trust is and what distrust is. They're not just, you know, distrust isn't just kind of the flip side of trust. Uh, we— there is a strong emotional component to what trusted news means. And, um, and to some extent, we think— we haven't tested this formally yet, although this is one of the things we want to do in the project— um, that, that emotional component may play a stronger role in distrust than than trust. For a lot of people, one of the things we focus on in our survey data, the people who are least trusting, as in have the least amount of trust towards news organizations in their countries, they're not necessarily the same people who are most vocal and sort of visible critics of the press. They're often people who are much more disengaged. So they're more— we call them more indifferent towards news. And they're not really differentiating much between the different sources that they're encountering, in part because they're less familiar with them. They have less of a sense of— they have less experience conversing or knowing journalists personally. And they just have less— they're less interested in news, less interested in politics often as well. And that's a kind of different category of— we call them the untrusting than what we often focus on when we think about people who have deep distrust of news. Often those people who have deep distrust actually are selectively trusting of particular sources.

Okay, so I'm wondering, though, what happened where it seems as though particular politicians are now trusted more than news outlets? How did that happen? Because it used to be you would trust anything other than a politician in life. And now suddenly, they've taken the lead, and people are gravitating toward what those individuals are saying over what news brands are bringing people. So, yeah, I mean, for how that happened.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's— it's always been the case that, um, there's been a close kind of association between news and politics, and people— a lot of people's perceptions of what news is, is a lot of political information, current affairs, even though that's actually not what most news focuses on. But people have had a strong association, and as people become increasingly polarized, at least in the United States, along partisan lines, their kind of lens through which they interpret the news is very much bound up in those political and partisan identities. And so bad news for a candidate that you are really passionate about or your political party that you believe is so deeply intertwined in your own identity, it has a sort of visceral effect on people. And so it becomes very much bound up in their entire sort of orientation towards political life. It's not necessarily the fault of the news, although there's probably ways in which certain news organizations have contributed to it. But it's, you know, I think it's more of a kind of symptom of the way in which politics, at least for the sort of hyper-politically engaged segment of the public, you know, are encountering the media these days. I think the other piece of it that's worth noting is that there are, you know, for a lot of people, the way the media environment has changed, it's allowed politicians to speak directly to their supporters or put out video. You know, they have a sort of much closer connection to their supporters and their political party than many journalists do and many news organizations do. And so I think that is a different dynamic than we've seen in the past as well, where, you know, people are actually able to keep up with what, you know, their favorite candidate is doing day to day without necessarily relying on reporters and editors to make their own sort of judgments about it. And I think that plays a big role as well in terms of the way that people are evaluating the information that they're reporting independently.

Okay. All right, so let's break down America a little bit, and let's start with the difference in ages that you may be looking at, because if you are a baby boomer in particular, news has changed dramatically in your lifetime. And a millennial, what they think of news is nothing at all like what a baby boomer will think of news, because the millennials didn't have the history, and they don't remember when people had to actually drive home to turn on a television at an appointed time to see what happened that day. So, um, in, in your study, how did— how do you see differences happening with the generations?

Yeah, I mean, I'll just say, you know, I, I'm actually in the millennial age range myself. And so I, I think actually many millennials are sort of in the, in the between space where I'd say a lot of the students that I've taught who are Gen Z, um, they're the ones that actually don't remember a world before, um, you know, 24/7 updates on their phones.

Right.

Whereas for me growing up, that was, um, you know, that I have distinct memories of those changes happening. Um, but, uh, you know, I think, um, one of the things that we find in our study using the kind of way that we've classified people as untrusting versus selectively trusting or generally trusting towards news brands is it's actually older older people across all 4 countries that tend to be most untrusting.

Mm-hmm.

So that younger age group tends to be somewhat more trusting of the set of brands they're encountering. Part of that may be bound up in the way that the, you know, so in the US at least, older people also are more likely to be Republican, more conservative. And so there's a political dimension that explains it, but that political dimension actually doesn't map onto what we're seeing in other countries necessarily. And so it is sort of striking that that younger generation tends to be the ones who are somewhat more trusting. And, um, and it's not— we don't actually know entirely why yet. I mean, some of it may be related to the forms of media that people are using, tend to be using more social media, um, more WhatsApp in Brazil and India. Um, and there may be some, some degree of, um, kind of giving sort of benefit of the doubt to some of the organizations, or it may be that they're actually differentiating between, you know, legitimate news organizations from everything else they're seeing on those platforms, since they are more trusting for that reason. It's hard to know at this point. That's one of the things we want to sort out in a little more depth as the project goes on. This— we're only in year 1 of 3.

Okay. All right. Any difference between male and female?

Yeah, we did find some differences, not consistently in every country, but it does tend to be more men who are typically in that untrusting category. And the differences are not huge. So it's possible that some of this is just due to differences in response styles where men may be sort of more likely to state a negative view in the survey. It's one of the things that we don't have a clear explanation for why we see this difference. And it's not consistent in every country. I think in the US, Um, there was not a major gender difference.

Okay. All right. And what about geography? You know, there, there's the idea of geography is destiny. How, how does where I live impact how I feel about news?

Yeah, we do find a pretty striking pattern when it comes to geography. I mean, there's some kind of regional differences from country to country in terms of parts of those countries that tend to be— we find more sort of overrepresentation of that untrusting group. Um, but we also find, at least in India, the US, and the UK, People who are sort of farther away from those urban centers, so either in rural areas or small towns, we do find much higher disproportionate levels of that untrusting population. Again, this is— they also tend to be places, those at least in the US, those also do tend to be places where people are somewhat less likely to have college degrees, do tend to be older. And so some of these things are kind of intertwined with each other, and one we haven't done the additional kinds of statistical analysis that we want to do after this report's now been published to see whether those things, even if you control for some of those differences, do those differences still persist? And I suspect that the geographic ones we're seeing actually will, because it's a really striking pattern, at least across 3 of the 4 countries.

And I would imagine a digital divide also plays into that.

Absolutely, yeah. The digital divide. And also, the other thing I had spoke of earlier about the kind of experiences that people have getting to know journalists either personally or just being interviewed for news stories. You know, a lot of the major news organizations are based in those urban centers, and so it makes some sense that it feels more distant to people. The focus of the coverage is also typically more focused around what's happening in those big urban areas, and so people just feel somewhat more disconnected and more ultimately indifferent towards what they're publishing because it doesn't seem like it has that much relevance to their day-to-day lives.

Okay, let's turn it a little bit into, you know, now we get our, our news from social media outlets. But part of the issue there is, especially if people aren't very tech savvy, you know, the news is coming at them through Facebook, but not from Facebook. So it's coming from different sources, but it's often hard to track the actual source, right?

Yeah. Yeah, and that's one thing that, you know, we focused more on this in our second report, which was based on some in-depth interviews and focus groups we did with, with people in all 4 countries. And we really tried to understand the way that they understood the idea of trust and how they differentiated between sources. And a lot of people would talk about the challenge they felt when navigating news and information on platforms like Facebook or, or, or others, where they, you know, the way that you're interacting with those sources is in this very fleeting, you know, flipping through your newsfeed. You spend a fraction of a second on each one. You don't get the same kinds of information about, you know, what sources are credible unless you come to it with some preexisting knowledge. And if that's the primary way that you're engaging with news, it's very easy to not sort of know which of those sources you can trust unless you've sort of develop that set of, or that base of knowledge from, you know, whether in school or from previous experience or using sources in other ways, um, you know, what makes a news story that's published by one news organization different from, um, some other digital source? And, you know, people have some kinds of rules of thumb they use, but ultimately what they told us was a lot of it is based on their sense of familiarity with the brand, the sense of history with the brand is big, especially, you know, in the UK, A lot of people had very strong associations of having grown up with the BBC. And so they knew that they just had this sort of warm feeling towards it because it's what their parents had used and what they'd grown up with. They couldn't really articulate exactly why their reporting was necessarily more trustworthy than another source. And for most people, they don't engage to that level of depth with the journalism that they're encountering. And so it makes sense that they're sort of relying on more visible indicators of what's trustworthy about the appearance or or just simply seeing it all the time or seeing other people sharing it all the time as an indicator that it might be more trustworthy than everything else.

Okay, well, I guess part of my question too is if they don't really know where the news is coming from, because it is kind of hard to track when everything's just kind of shoved together on one page, um, you know, can they distinguish between what is news and what is a piece of commentary or opinion, which is actually a piece of biased information by definition.

Right.

But can they— but do they know the difference? You know, because one of the big complaints is everything is biased, right?

Yeah. So, you know, we asked a question about this on our survey, um, about how confident people were in at least, um, their understanding of the difference between some of these terms, like, um, you know, an op-ed, uh, or a, um, an editorial and a news story. And, you know, there— I think I'm trying to look for the actual numbers exactly, but you'd be surprised at how many people, um, will tell you in a survey, be upfront about the fact that they don't really know, um, what those terms mean. Um, and one of the things, you know, despite the fact that we actually find fairly high, you know, maybe higher than a lot of people would expect, levels of trust in news in general, or I should say information in the news in general, which is the slightly different way that we measured it, Mm-hmm. you get pretty high levels of people who have pretty cynical views about what it is that journalists are doing. So for instance, you know, between 25% and 40% of people in all 4 countries thought that journalists were very often getting paid by their sources or trying to manipulate the public or allowing their personal opinions to influence the reporting. And that's— and we don't see much difference actually in terms of the degree to which people who are generally untrusting towards news and people who are generally trusting towards news hold these kinds of ideas. On that question about knowing the difference between a reporter and a commentator, only about under half of people in the US, the UK, and Brazil, and about 70% of people in India said they were completely or very familiar with with that concept, or the difference between an editorial and news story. Only 36%, 38% in the UK and Brazil felt like they were completely or very familiar with that. Half, or 63%, in India. Half, 49%, in the US. So there's the level of understanding in general about what it is that journalists are doing overall is pretty low. And so I think it's absolutely You know, where there are fewer indicators of what's a news story versus what's commentary online, or frankly on cable news. It's— it is harder than ever before for people to know kind of how to separate those two.

Sure. Yeah, we do find a printed newspaper has always been pretty good about labeling different sections. But even when a print newspaper goes online, All of those rules just go out the window, and it's very hard to navigate. So you do see people struggling, um, which I guess all of it comes back to education itself. In any of these countries, are they teaching media literacy as any kind of standard in the schools, or is it kind of an add-on? Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't.

Yeah, there's a wide variation in all of these countries in terms of the degree to which people are getting that kind of formal training and, and, um, And then, of course, people who are out of school, who did grow up in a very different media environment, who are now acclimating to this new world of information, who don't have that opportunity to get that training in school themselves. And so, yeah, I think there is some significant gaps in most people's sort of training in terms of how to navigate these systems.

Do you think journalists in a newsroom understand the difference between what they're doing to build trust and what the audience thinks is trustworthy?

I think some have better sense of it than others. I think many journalists are very focused on, uh, you know, the day-to-day, um, deadline pressure and, and the sort of existential crises facing many news organizations in terms of their own financial standing. And so many, I think, are not so focused on these questions about how the audience is engaging with their work so much as getting through the day, getting through the week, and the sort of immediate concerns of the stories that they're working on. Which I think if you look at the ways in which newsroom staff has really contracted, especially in the US, especially at the local level over the last couple decades, many are doing way more with fewer resources than compared to even just a few years ago. And so I don't blame them for having a hard time sort of putting all that aside and trying to get a better handle on what their audiences are experiencing when they're navigating their work. But it does create some major problems because I think that there is a disconnect, at least when thinking about the interviews that we did and what we're seeing in our survey data, there is a huge disconnect between the way that a lot of journalists think about these things and the way that a lot of the public thinks about news, which is often, for most people, doesn't have that much relevance to the way they live their lives, except for people who are really invested in politics. And then it has a very specific kind of relevance and sort of urgency. But that's not most people.

OK, well, what would you say the BBC is doing, though, that It seems to have a large trust factor going on, even with people who can't explain why. So what's going on there?

Yeah, one of the unique things about the BBC, and of course BBC has critics on both sides, or I should say multiple sides, it's not just a sort of single dimension of politics. And we see that in some of our interviews, both people criticizing it for being too conservative, people criticizing it for being too woke. And so, you know, it's, it it struggles with a lot of these same issues, but it is much more trusted in a sort of broad-based way in the UK. And I think one of the things it does benefit from, which we heard in our interviews, is it's funded in a different way. So it is sort of, you know, it's funded through TV license fees and public funding in the UK, not commercial private interests. And so, um, and people recognize that and they, they appreciate that in a way that, um, some of the people that we interviewed in the US pointed to their trust in PBS and NPR for the same reason. They felt like they weren't beholden to commercial interests in the same way, um, that they felt applied to many private news organizations.

Okay, I do have a couple questions from the audience here, one of which is dealing with You know, what kind of clues should the public seek from a news report to help determine accurate versus inaccurate reporting or truth versus non-truths? I mean, I could tell you off the top of my head, one of the guidelines the Fair Media Council gives out is don't rely on one source for your news. You know, we want to see people using as many varied sources as possible. So let's get your take on that.

Yeah, I mean, so I think that's a good rule of thumb. And it's also one that I think a lot of people have internalized. And maybe overly internalized sometimes. I think that there are some people who, because they have this fear of being kind of taken in by news sources, that they don't feel like they can trust any of them. And they have to be sort of generally skeptical of everything and distrusting of everything they encounter. And that's not really a helpful way to live your life. And so I think finding news organizations that you feel do deserve your trust, understanding what it is that they're doing that a different news organization is not doing or maybe doing less effectively, I think so. You know, I think making those differentiations is actually really important. It's also true you don't want to rely on a single source. But, you know, I would encourage— it's a hard question for me as a researcher to address because it deals with like what people should do, when a lot of what we're trying to do is figure out how people are behaving, how they are differentiating.

And—

But I can tell you what I do personally, which is I do focus a lot on sort of how transparent the organization is being about their own reporting practices, so telling you what they don't know as well as what they do know. You know, I do pay attention to bylines, and so getting a sense of how that person has a track record of reporting and what they've reported in the past, which informs whether I think they've sort of done their due diligence on that story. Paying attention to the whether they're reporting original information based on confirming details independently on their own versus just sort of repackaging stuff that's been reported elsewhere. That's not— unfortunately, that's not obvious in a lot of news coverage. They try to sort of COVID that up in the reporting. But often when they've done a lot of work, like they went to court to get some documents revealed, they'll make that very clear. And I think that's usually a good indication that this organization is You know, putting the resources towards reporting original information and not just relying on secondhand stuff that's been reported elsewhere.

Yeah, and I also find kind of a newer guideline is a lot of the really reputable, reputable brands will come out and say we were wrong when they were wrong, you know, and admit the error. Where you won't find that happening everywhere.

And that is one thing that really sets professional journalists apart from others who sort of operate in the space, is they really do hold this commitment to accurate reporting and correcting the record when they make mistakes very seriously. And not everybody does that. And so I think that's another key thing to pay attention to. The other thing I would add, too, is, you know, to the extent that they make the original They're reporting on documents or, you know, information that they can post the original source material to on their website. That's, that's often a good sign. Sometimes people do that sort of as a, as a cover. But if you, you know, if they're, if they're doing that work and you can look at it yourself and sort of, you know, take some appreciation for the fact that they're going that extra mile.

Yeah.

To be transparent, I think that that usually is a good indication that there is something that sets this organization apart from, you know, the other brands that you might encounter in your Facebook feed.

Okay, and speaking about the source, I do have a question here. How do people gain access to your survey?

To participate in the survey?

Or, or to see your survey results for this latest one, at least.

Oh, to see the report. Yeah, so we published on our website at the Reuters Institute website, which is— I should know— reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk. It's a bit of a mouthful. It's the way that the University of Oxford makes their websites work. But it's right up there on the homepage of our site right now is the full report. And there's a link as well to the larger Trusted News Project. So you can see the other reports we've published previously, And I should say too, with our report, there's some detail, there's a little bit more detail than I provided about the methods of our survey and how we went about identifying people to recruit and get and achieve a more or less representative population in each of the 4 countries.

Okay, we actually need to wrap up. Is there anything that we should have talked about that I didn't bring up and didn't get out of you?

Sure. I mean, I'll just, one last thing is, you know, we are really focused, or our hope with this project is eventually get to a place where we can test some possible interventions to see ways that news organizations can try to build trust with their audiences. And so much different organizations have tried different things, but there's not a lot of empirical evidence about what actually works. And so that's sort of where we're hoping to go. So if you work for a news organization or have some connections to news organizations that are trying and experimenting with different things, we'd love to hear from you because that is sort of where we hope to go with this project over the coming years.

Okay, great. And you really do seem to enjoy the work you're doing.

I do, very much so.

Yeah.

And how much do the students play into this?

You know, one of the— that's one of the nice things about my role. I have kind of one foot in this world, in this project here in Oxford, and then back at the University of Minnesota where I'm on faculty at the Hubbard School of Journalism. I still do teach classes. And so the students aren't directly involved in this project, but there we have a thriving student body interested in journalism, interested in going into journalism, um, in many cases getting jobs in journalism. And, uh, you know, it's, it's one of the really gratifying things about being a faculty member is getting to be involved in seeing those students grow and learn and develop and, and start their careers in this field.

The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating For quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org.

Thank you.

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