Think of it as the Wizard of Oz in reverse. Instead of telling the public to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” journalists and news organizations are deliberately pulling back the curtain and revealing how they do their work to build trust in the media.
The ethics codes of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Radio Television Digital News Association and many others include a promise to be transparent in their codes of ethics. One part of being transparent with your audience is being clear about the methods you use while reporting.
David Fahrenthold, a journalist for The Washington Post who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s charitable giving, reveals a lot about his methods on social media, telling followers what he’s working on and asking for their help. “There’s cases in which you have a tip, and you’re trying to run it down. You don’t want to let people know what you’re working on because it may not be true,” he said. “But in cases where what you’re doing is something you can tell people that you’ve verified it’s true, and you’re not going to burn any sources, I think it’s really important to show people how you do your work.”
Farenthold compared his approach to the TV program How It’s Made, which shows how everyday items are manufactured. “People like it. People find it interesting to watch the work as it happens,” he said. “You know, they make movies about journalists. Maybe not the most exciting movies but they make movies about us because people like kind of seeing the mystery be solved.”
Fahrenthold doesn’t just share the solution to the mystery, he includes the audience in every twist and turn leading up to the solution. For example, on April 23, 2018 he told his Twitter followers he was off to New York for a hearing on a lawsuit against the Trump Organization filed by a condo board that wanted to remove the Trump name from its building. He also shared questions he had posed to the Trump Organization. “I’ll let you know when I get a response,” he wrote on Twitter. “And I’ll keep you updated on the hearing tomorrow.”
Here’s how I put that Q to Trump Org today. I’ll let you know when I get a response. And I’ll keep you updated on the hearing tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/CuT5kBPV2f
— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) April 23, 2018
In a series of tweets, Fahrenthold not only explained what he was working on, which helped people get engaged, he also provided updates, showed his work and included his source material.
“You want to give people a sense that they’re watching something unfold in real time,” Farenthold said. Doing that has become part of his regular practice.
The operations editor for the local and business desks at the Washington Post, Shefali Kulkarni, sees social media as a great tool for journalists to be transparent about their work. “A lot of news outlets tend to use social media as a distribution platform, which it definitely is, but it can also be a great trust building kind of a tool. It can show transparency,” Kulkarni said.
“You don’t have to really get creative about this,” said Cheryl Carpenter, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute and part of the team of journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on the Panama Papers. “You just have to try to figure out what works with your audience.”
Carpenter recommends hyperlinking to source material and disclosing how many people you tried to reach for a story versus how many talked to you. Other ways to be transparent about your methods? “Making yourself available to answer questions, whether that’s on social media or whether that’s just look at the comments on your site, or doing an interview with another media colleague,” she said.
Transparency isn’t just for individual journalists. Some news organizations have made it part of their standard operating procedure. For example, the Center for Public Integrity shared how a survey was conducted that found a majority of Americans favored cuts in defense spending and how data was analyzed for a story about the hazard of traffic exhaust fumes to the health of students in thousands of schools. ProPublica explained how it obtained government data on the link between Agent Orange and birth defects.
Other news organizations have explained their use of new technology like drones. .News Director Kate Morris of KTVB in Boise, Idaho, says staffers draw a crowd whenever the drone is up, so the station decided to do a story about it.
Morris told Jennifer Nelson of the Reynolds Journalism Institute that the station’s drone operators are happy to show people their licenses and waivers. “We also remind people that we’ve had telephoto lenses for decades. We don’t spy on people in their backyards or peer through windows with our telephoto lenses. We could go on top of a building and shoot down to street level. Our goal is not to invade privacy. We operate under the same journalistic standards of integrity that we do with our regular cameras. So for me, ultimately, it’s about building trust through transparency.”
Journalists have options when it comes to attempting to rebuild trust with their audiences, and with technology changing rapidly it is becoming more important for journalists to use it to be more transparent.
Can transparency make a difference? If it’s practiced consistently and widely, maybe. “Every newsroom, and basically also every single story must show why they deserve more trust than dozens or even hundreds of others on the same topic,” Dr. Klaus Meier of Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt argued in a 2009 paper.
“It’s important to be realistic about the impact of transparency,” Craig Silverman wrote in a report on transparency for the American Press Institute “It will not necessarily result in immediate changes in traffic, or engagement, though some initiatives will certainly have positive effects. It is not a cure-all, but it does have value.”
Indeed, transparency may be a crucial step towards rebuilding the public’s trust in the media.
Lauren Heiser is a student at the University of Montana and a multimedia journalist for a local CBS affiliate. She is a weekend reporter which gives her the opportunity to report on all different subjects, from changes in the medical community to the Women’s March in Missoula. Her favorite part of being a reporter is doing the research and learning from her community.
