Books

Can You Trust The Media?

Op-Ed

Why Should We Trust Storytellers? | Adrian Monck | The Guardian

Reviews

Monck’s new book, Can You Trust the Media?, written with Mike Hanley, rips what they call the culture’s “trust obsession.” Beware the newspapers, magazines, TV news operations, and other media institutions that crave the audience’s trust, they counsel. It’s just a con they’re running so they can sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Likewise, spurn those who pine for more “trustworthy” media institutions. Individual reporters and columnists may be trustworthy, but the only dependable way to tame the public’s doubts is to give them access to the raw data from which journalism is produced.

Jack Shafer | Washington Post

Monck’s title question Can You Trust the Media? is comprehensively answered in his essay: no, you cannot trust the media and you never could. Monck does not believe that standards are falling but he does feel that an increasing lack of trust is a rational public response to ever-less trustworthy media.

“From a commercial point of view,” he writes, “trust is a worthless asset”. He mocks “the touching faith that if only people could bear witness to the truth, they will act for the good” and emphasises the emotional rather than rational baggage which the reading and viewing public bring to every issue.

Monck notes that in journalistic practice “moral issues barely get raised at all”. He believes more in the need for journalism to reveal and explain; he wants contempt laws liberalised and the secret services to be more open, so that we might better understand what is at stake in the war on terror.

If journalism is in crisis, some of the components of that crisis are as old as journalism itself and are indivisible from it. In this accessible, jauntily written book, Monck ends up certain that we need journalism but sees it, with affection and exasperation, as a flawed thing, which, when it does good, does so by accident.

John Lloyd | Financial Times

Trust Just Got Busted | Peter Preston | The Guardian

Tried And Trusted | Steven Poole | The Guardian

On Trust And The Media | Stephen Pritchard | The Observer

All The News That’s Fit To Print | Tim Luckhurst | Times Higher Education