Should the media be concerned about trust?

BY Adrian Monck| IN Media Practice | 12/11/2008

Extracted from  Can You Trust the Media? by Adrian Monck

# Hardcover: 256 pages
# Publisher: Icon Books Ltd (1 May 2008)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 1840468726
# ISBN-13: 978-1840468724

                       What¿s trust got to do with it?

Where does this trust obsession come from? The numbers show us that trust doesn¿t bring readers or viewers, but every -one from the Prime Minister down thinks it¿s important.

Why?

In Britain, a media crisis is not a crisis until it engulfs the BBC, which dominates the media landscape like no other institution ever could and hopefully ever will. This current bout of media soul-searching, the endless round of debates and discussions, congealed around a series of BBC blunders – the Queen¿s trailers and a blatant fraud on the public with a premium-rate phone line among them. But the question is, why now? Journalists haven¿t changed the way they work –the public itself has always held the fourth estate in the contempt which it deserves. What has caused this current existential crisis?

For the BBC, it all started at the beginning of the 2000s. If you look back through old reviews from the 1980s and 1990s, you¿ll see BBC News described as ¿authoritative¿. But in the 21st century, ¿authority¿ as a value has become seriously out of fashion. It implied distance and deference and it was difficult to measure. Our modern fixation with polling people and giving them what they want meant that the media industry no longer felt confident in its own judgements, instead handing leadership and content decisions over to a bunch of people who wouldn¿t know quality if it snuck up behind them and kicked their collective butts. The public, it turned out, thought it didn¿t want lectures from an authority figure; instead it wanted collegiality, phone-in polls, informality. It wanted to be able to ¿trust¿ what it was being told, but it didn¿t want to have to do anything it didn¿t want to, like exercise its brain cells.

¿Trust¿ looked like a good replacement for ¿authority¿, and trust could be backed with numbers. Polls found that although people don¿t trust the media overall, they trusted some bits much more than others. Tabloids fared worst, followed by partisan ¿quality¿ papers. Top of the trust heap were broadcasters. In a 2007 poll, broadcast journalists were considered twice as trustworthy as their local MP and three times as trustworthy as Tony Blair. Only 7 per cent of those polled thought that red-top reporters are trustworthy.

This trust data has been used to bolster the idea of media regulation. Broadcast journalists are highly regarded because they are highly regulated, runs the argument, not just because they have big audiences.Ever since its establishment, British broadcasting had been governed by regulations that said its news had to show due impartiality and fairness.

Editors had achieved this principally by avoiding political controversy, or by adopting a seesaw, ¿he said/she said¿ style of presentation, where every contentious point is matched by an uncontentious counter point. Faced with the divisive social issues of the 1970s and 1980s like Northern Irish terrorism and industrial disputes, television news did not take up arms on behalf of the proletariat, nor did it cheerlead for the British Army in Ulster. Instead it mostly kept its distance, with what defenders viewed as studied neutrality and critics saw as an infuriating patrician hauteur. By the 1990s this had gone on long enough to become a broadcast tradition. Few journalists swapped roles between newspapers and broadcasting. In the cosy duopoly of ITN and the BBC few even swapped companies. Even a newcomer like Sky News took so many of its journalists from ITN that it was known in the business as Sky-TN. So when polls confirmed that broadcast news was ¿trusted¿, this broadcast tradition and the regulation that underpinned it were saluted as avoiding the excesses of the press. Regulation delivered trust and trust was good. Editors and executives adopted this argument both inside and outside the BBC. As a broadcast news journalist and editor, I bought into it. But I was wrong. And if you want to know why, you have to go back to the place where the trust obsession began: the United States.

Back in the 1960s, in America, a strange shift took place. People began trusting the news from newspapers less and television more. How did this revolution in credibility occur? The same period saw increased car ownership and commuting, the beginning of the evening news on TV and the decline of evening newspapers. People voted with their time and pollsters, commissioned by the broadcasters to flesh out the relationship between individuals and advertisers, were happy to discover that despite the novelty of TV news, viewers ¿trusted¿ it. Trust meant that television – in case advertisers hadn¿t guessed already – was a great medium for selling. Of course, TV didn¿t need to prove itself. It was the sole route into the homes of millions of people and mass advertisers had to follow the people to sell their mass products.

What had newspapers done to lose favour and television to win it? Nothing.

The shift in trust reflected a shift in consumption. Quite simply, people trusted what they used, not vice versa. So firmly was that shift imprinted on public opinion that in the years following his retirement from presenting CBS News, anchor Walter Cronkite was still rated as the most trusted man in America.

Cronkite is still with us, but he is no longer as trusted. He hasn¿t been caught shoplifting or dodging taxes, but a couple of decades¿ absence from the nightly screens of Americans has eroded his trustworthiness. Cronkite has not been alone in experiencing this coastal erosion. TV might have overtaken newspapers in trust ratings but Americans¿ confidence in public institutions as a whole began to crumble as the twentieth century matured.

One of the best analyses of that shift is by two American academics, Paul Gronke and the late Timothy Cook. They looked back at years of polling data and concluded that these were the main attributes of people who said they trusted the media:

• Young

• Badly educated

• Poor

• Non-churchgoers

• Democrat

• Non-partisan

What made people distrust the media? Just switch it around to any one of these characteristics:

• Older

• University educated

• Wealthy

• Socially conservative

• Republican

• Highly partisan

And those attributes read something like the headline social and demographic changes in the United States in the past quarter of a century: Ageing baby boomers. Better education. Higher pay. Republicans enjoying long spells controlling the White House and Congress. The rise of the religious right and strengthened conservative values. These trends increased the numbers of people likely to distrust the media. The sole demographic factor in the media¿s favour was a drop in church attendance.

Americans who were older, smarter and better off were more sceptical of the news media, but they remained its most devoted audience.

Prof Adrian Monck is Head of Journalism at City University London.

a.monck@city.ac.uk