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. Can You Trust The Media?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

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