Trust, as an issue for the media, never seems to be far from the news itself. Here’s Reuters‘ exec Geert Linnebank:

We will always need a place for a news organization whose watchword is trust. Trust will be the differentiator in the new media dynamic. Your independence and impartiality will mark you out.

According to Linnebank, trust is an important brand attribute, but it has to be earned and owned. This is old time moralising of the kind I usually save for my kids, but it probably works for conferences. The BBC loves trust too (although as I’ve said before, if we called it credulity, they wouldn’t be quite so keen).

There are lots of polls on media trust but as Ronald Coase noted of early studies in business administration, “without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material…”

One of the most interesting looks at declining trust in the media comes from 2001, when two U.S. academics, Timothy Cook and Paul Gronke, examined why public confidence in the American media had collapsed during the last quarter of the twentieth century. They came to some interesting conclusions.

First, the collapse wasn’t an illusion or trick of the numbers – confidence in the media certainly had dropped. People prepared to say they had a “great deal” of confidence in the press had all but disappeared. The number saying “hardly any” had risen substantially.

Some people, like eminent news exec turned academic Philip Meyer, argued that it wasn’t the media’s fault. Lots of institutions had suffered a decline in public confidence.

The whole trust issue could be seen simply as “a plague on all your houses,” although Meyer turned that idea on its head:

When the public has confidence in the press, it also has confidence in the executive branch of the federal government (the Watergate years being the standout exception).

If we generalize from that to the case of newspapers, we begin to suspect that trust might not be so much of a characteristic of a newspaper so much as of its community – or perhaps more precisely, of the interaction between a newspaper and its community.

To some extent Meyer was right. But he based his assessment on an earlier examination of public trust. That study found that a lot of other institutions, like government, had also suffered a drop in confidence over the same period.

But, as Gronke and Cook noted, levels of confidence in the press (not TV) had started higher, and fallen lower, than confidence in other institutions. So they hadn’t just been tarred with the same brush.

It was true to say that people who were confident in a range of institutions were also likely to be confident in the media. These were the main attributes of people who said they were more confident in the media:

• Younger
• Less education
• Low income
• Non-church attenders
• Democrat
• Non-partisan

But what made people less confident in the media? Just switch it around to any one of these characteristics:

• Older
• University educated
• Wealthy
• Socially conservative
• Republican
• Highly Partisan

Do those attributes read something like the headlines from the societal and demographic shifts happening in the United States over the past quarter of the century?

The baby boomers were aging. Educational attainment and pay had gone up. The red state/blue state divide sharpened (cf. 1996 Fox News goes on the air). Republicans enjoyed long spells running the White House and Congress. The rise of the religious right strengthened conservative values.

All these trends eroded press confidence. The single factor strengthening press confidence was a decline in church attendance.

When Cook and Gronke ended their study in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal appeared to have alienated even Democrats and liberals from their traditional confidence in the media.

The pair closed with a familiar paradox:

the news media – particularly newspapers – often finds the most regular and devoted readers and viewers are among the staunchest critics.

Americans who are older, wiser and better off are more skeptical of the press, but they remain its biggest audience. The young and the less-privileged trust the fourth estate, but don’t much care for it dressed up as a newspaper or an evening newscast.

There’s a message there somewhere, but a theory? That’ll be a while coming…