{"id":366,"date":"2007-03-23T02:20:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-23T08:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=366"},"modified":"2007-03-23T02:20:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-23T08:20:00","slug":"trust-and-the-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/03\/trust-and-the-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Trust and the media"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>rust<\/span>, as an issue for the media, never seems to be far from the news itself. Here’s Reuters<\/span>‘ exec Geert Linnebank<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Linnebank, trust is an important brand<\/span> 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<\/span> loves trust too (although as I’ve said before, if we called it credulity<\/span>, they wouldn’t be quite so keen).<\/p>\n

There are lots of polls on media trust but as Ronald Coase<\/span><\/a> noted of early studies in business administration, \u201cwithout a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material…\u201d<\/p>\n

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

First, the collapse wasn\u2019t an illusion or trick of the numbers \u2013 confidence in the media certainly had dropped. People prepared to say they had a \u201cgreat deal\u201d of confidence in the press had all but disappeared. The number saying \u201chardly any\u201d had risen substantially.<\/p>\n

Some people, like eminent news exec turned academic Philip Meyer<\/a>, argued that it wasn\u2019t the media\u2019s fault. Lots of institutions had suffered a decline in public confidence.<\/p>\n

The whole trust issue could be seen simply as \u201ca plague on all your houses,\u201d although Meyer turned that idea on its head:<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 or perhaps more precisely, of the interaction between a newspaper and its community.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To some extent Meyer was right. But he based his assessment on an earlier examination<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t just been tarred with the same brush.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n