How to regain trust
News organizations are trying a wide range of strategies to sustain and rebuild public trust, from greater transparency to more engagement with the communities they serve. Some would argue there’s no need for all that. “Just keep doing your jobs and don’t make mistakes,” CBS reporter Chip Reid told a national journalism conference. But NBC’s Chuck Todd disagrees. “The idea that our work will speak for itself is hopelessly naive,” he wrote in The Atlantic.
If there is any hope of regaining public trust, just playing it straight may not be enough. But some would argue there’s no point in doing anything else because the people who’ve lost confidence in the news media will never come back. Not true. While more than two-thirds of all adults, not just Republicans and conservatives, say their trust in the news media has declined in the past decade, a Knight Foundation survey found that 69% of those who have lost trust say their trust can be restored.
What will it take to earn back their trust? We looked into strategies newsrooms and journalists are employing that are specifically designed to achieve that goal.
By Deborah Potter. There's some good news from newsrooms around the world. More journalists than ever are making it a habit to fact-check information and to ensure that they communicate ...
By Deborah Potter. So that didn’t go well. A six-month project by the Society of Professional Journalists to address media distrust in Casper, Wyoming, failed to move the needle. At ...
By Deborah Potter. After more than a year of work, a commission supported by the Knight Foundation has offered recommendations for dealing with what it calls "a crisis of trust." ...
By Deborah Potter. Op-ed. Anonymous source. Commentary. Journalists know what these terms mean but many Americans don't. A recent survey found the vast majority of Americans sometimes confuse factual statements ...
by Deborah Potter. Most established news organizations have fretted for years about how to remain economically viable in the face of the advertising implosion that has drastically cut their revenue ...
By Matt Skillman. On November 3, 1948, the Chicago Tribune made one of the most memorable journalistic errors ever. One of the Tribune’s veteran political analysts predicted the defeat of ...
By Madeline Broom. The journalism industry has been talking about the lack of diversity in newsrooms for years and making only some progress. Now, the need to rebuild public trust ...
By Maddie Vincent. The press. The fourth estate. The watchdogs. These are names journalists call themselves, names that hint at the integrity and importance of their profession. But who are ...
By Callahan Peel. As the use of social media continues to skyrocket, many newsrooms have developed positions called “Engagement Editors.” These staffers are responsible for interacting with news consumers and ...
By Beau Baker. One way institutions can earn the public’s trust is by holding themselves accountable for missteps and mistakes. That’s traditionally been the role of an ombudsman but there ...
By Lauren Heiser. 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 ...
By Flint McColgan. It’s easy, now, to say there’s a divide that must be bridged between journalists and news organizations and the audience their coverage is for. A major wake-up ...
by Deborah Potter. We all know what’s happened to trust in the news media. It sank to a new low in 2016, according to Gallup, with just 32 percent saying they ...
by Deborah Potter. When you produce a story, are you thinking of how people are going to consume it? Mick Côté, digital news editor at The Canadian Press, says that in most ...
