What is trust?

Note: I published a companion piece called “What is Truth?”, collectively the articles explore the relationship between trust and truth.

Many people share deep concern about misinformation and are determined to counter it. The journalism community, in particular, is passionate about the need to tackle this challenge. We aspire to believe that thoughtful news organizations can guide our societies with the power of objective facts, helping to counteract “bad” information with “good.”

Sadly, overall trust in the news media has experienced an avalanche of decline. According to Gallup’s polling, Americans’ trust in media, such as newspapers, television and radio, has been dropping for five decades. The slide did not begin with the internet. In the 1970s trust in news ranged from 68% to 72%, then fell further to smaller majorities of 51% to 55% in the 1990s and early 2000s. By 2016 it had fallen to 32%. The year 2024 saw a similarly low average trust. Worse, it showed that those who do not trust journalism at all increased to 36%! About 33% said they trusted it “not very much,” while the remaining 31% said they trusted journalism a fair amount or a great deal. Less than a third gave the news media their respect. These are troubling numbers. The perceived trustworthiness of our society’s institutional sources of objective facts has collapsed.

Let’s consider the question of trust, and dig a bit deeper. It is often asserted that ‘trust in journalism’ must be cultivated, and that increased media literacy education is necessary for people to discern between misinformation and fact-based reporting. While important, this is at best a partial solution. Suggesting someone should “trust in journalism” generally, or to trust in “traditional” news sources, is comparable to advocating that people trust in all politicians or all used car salespeople. Pew Research tells us all those professions have very low trustworthy ratings.

Journalism is not monolithic. It has many variations in quality, in approach, and in degree of partisanship. While we may speak thoughtfully of journalistic ethics, their acceptance and consistent application are not universal. There are no applicable laws, nor should there be, not if you believe in a free press.

I first met Sally Lehrman in the 1990’s when several of us involved in digital media from across the San Francisco Bay Area had established informal monthly roundtable discussions. These discussions were frequently held around the big conference table at the @Home Network’s newsroom which I was leading at the time. The roundtables included Jay Singh, then editor of CNET, David Weir from HotWired, Bruce Koon from the San Jose Mercury News, Roland De Wolk, a news producer at the local CBS affiliate and a journalism instructor at San Francisco State University, among many others. Our discussions were an exchange of thoughts and ideas about the evolving media landscape.

Lehrman was an award-winning reporter specializing in medicine, science and related policy. She has received numerous accolades including a Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award and a duPont/Columbia Silver Baton. Shortly before we began the roundtables, Lehrman became director of the journalism ethics program at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Lehrman’s thoughtful and measured insights led to years of continued dialog, and her perspectives remain highly valued.

In 2014, I worked closely with Lehrman as she established and founded the Trust Project. Lehrman was fiercely determined. She would investigate the reasons behind declining trust. She would develop methods to guide news organizations in their efforts to build trust. To this day, the Trust Project continues to advise news organizations on better understanding the perceptions of their readers and actively seeking to earn and re-earn trust. Lehrman advocates for a more structured approach to transparency, about the organization itself, about their reporters, about the organization’s ownership, about how they do their work. The Trust Project remains a noble and ongoing endeavor, one I believed in then and still do. Transparency matters. Measuring the trust of our society matters. Lehrman’s initiative offers valuable insights and innovative paths forward.

Among the Trust Project’s key findings was the significant role of personal affinity in building trust. People naturally gravitate towards trusting someone they believe is more like them. Women will more likely trust female journalists, people of color will more likely show greater respect for journalists of color, as do individuals of other ethnicities and cohorts. While understandable, this phenomenon is also troubling, as it highlights the divisiveness within our societies. It suggests greater difficulty in developing trust across diverse ethical and class distinctions.

Affinity is powerful. It’s a prime driver of the contemporary success of influencers. Whether in fashion or politics, people align with those they feel are like them or aspire to be like. A recent study by Jigsaw at Google found that the younger generation deeply distrusts traditional media, they won’t read a New York Times article without first checking the comments for opinions from people they perceive as like them. They filter consumption through affinity before trusting the supposed source of objective facts.

We all have trust in someone or something. Are they trustworthy?

I now realize I misunderstood the nature and challenge of trust, or at least how we use that word. We do not have a deficit of trust. Everyone trusts someone. Everyone trusts certain sources of information. More accurately, the issue is whether those who believe in objective facts deem the sources others trust as worthy. It’s complicated, as calculating trust involves many factors.

Before the Internet, the amount of opinion content in a legacy newspaper in the United States was small, typically limited to the editorial page for the newspapers views, and later the OpEd page for curated third party opinions (literally, opposite from the editorial page). Today, with unlimited space, news sites offer significantly more opinion and a greater number of partisan voices. We assume readers understand the distinction between fact-based coverage and partisan opinion. For the most part, research tells us they do not.

The sheer volume of opinion on a news site creates doubt about the trustworthiness of the fact-based coverage that sits by its side. If the reader agrees with the opinions, they are inclined to trust the fact-based coverage. If they don’t, they won’t. Does the reader’s quest to understand what to think become overwhelmed by the chorus of opinionated voices dictating what they should think?

Journalism has never been solely about fact-based coverage. It has always encompassed varying degrees of partisanship, perspective, and opinion. The left-leaning news brands are despised by the right. The right-leaning news brands are despised by the left. Both lean toward affirmation rather than information. Sadly, fact-based coverage is drowned in a flood of opinion, often skewed through a particularly lens.

What is the answer to that dilemma? Could we evolve or create journalistic organizations capable of bridging the gaps of divisiveness and establishing frameworks that foster consensus? Can we develop news outlets that strive to earn respect from across the political spectrum? Building trust with a partisan cohort eager to hear the confirmation of their biases is easy. That’s not trust, it’s affinity, it’s blind loyalty. However, building trust across chasms of divisiveness is hard. That’s called respect.

If one is researching the level of trust in news organizations, it would be wise to consider the survey respondent’s self-identified political lean. How effectively is the organization gaining respect from across the political spectrum? How might such broad respect be earned?

In striving to build trust across the divide, we must acknowledge that partisan news organizations are less helpful, if not problematic. By definition, a partisan outlet aligns with a specific point-of-view or political movement. In addressing divisiveness and guiding toward consensus, partisanship acts as a roadblock, not a solution.

My preferred definition of journalism is to give people the tools and information they need to be good citizens. It is not to dictate what people should think, but to provide them the information they need to form their own conclusions. My ideal motto would be one that strives for objectivity: We inform, you decide.

Some question how anyone can be objective in such a partisan world. Let’s challenge that. Objectivity isn’t about one’s beliefs; rather, it’s a rigorous process of critical thinking that pursues facts accurately and fairly, regardless of one’s personal beliefs or political agenda. As Marty Baron suggests in his superb book, Collisions of Power, “we should expect journalists to be objective just as we as journalists demand that police and judges be objective.”

In the world of media, trust must be constantly earned and re-earned. Recently in a discussion at Stanford University, a thoughtful graduate student, Hannah Woodworth, suggested we borrow from philosophy: frame the contrast between journalists who assume trust due to their profession (epistemic arrogance) and those who recognize the need to interrogate their own credibility and methods (epistemic humility). A wise observation.

How trust is trust formed?

Let’s go a bit deeper. How do people develop trust in various sources of information? There are several vectors:

First, we trust people we know and those endorsed by people we know. It’s a social construct, good, bad, or indifferent. We trust people who are more like us, one way or another. We are tribal. If the head of the tribe says the moon is green, we will likely say yes, to be sure we get a leg of the calf at dinner. Primarily, trust is a social construct. Such tribal behavior is heavily influence by our personal social context, from our families, our friends, and our religion if we have one.

Second, we trust institutions: the church, a government, a charismatic leader, or a specific news source. Yet institutional trust can deteriorate and shift, as is evident today.

Third, trust is cultivated through what is termed ‘information architecture”. Academic and scientific journals, for instanced are more highly trusted by their readers due to their robust information architecture, where each article features a fact-based narrative supported by footnotes, relevant data, transparent sourcing, and rigorous peer review.

Wikipedia, much like encyclopedias before it, employs a rigid architecture of referencing and a refined approach to fact-based narratives. These structures evolved over time to address challenges of veracity and trust, elucidating an entity’s principles through the organization and structure of its work.

Perhaps we should consider whether the information architecture of legacy journalism is serving today’s mission. At the macro level, the information architecture of a news brand, like the New York Times or the Washington Post, includes a mix of fact-based journalism surrounded by ever more opinion. Some news brands continue to make political endorsements. This architecture of objective fact-based journalism packaged with subjective partisan expression seems rather counterproductive. We cannot expect broad trust in fact-based journalism if it is surrounded by opinion that suggest otherwise.

It might also be wise to rethink the information architecture of the article itself, of the atomic unit of fact-based journalism, to better reinforce the factual nature of the work, reduce the perception of bias, and respect the audience we think should respect us.

Another vector, arguably part of information architecture, is the sheer range of content offered by a news organization. In the heyday of newspapers, they offered readers a wide array of information, from serious coverage of current events to less critical areas of information that were valuable to the reader’s daily life, such as weather, movie times, and stock quotes. Since the reader found the movie times and sports scores accurate, it would lend a degree of trustworthiness to the more serious and potentially controversial content.

While the internet has replaced newspapers as primary sources of such basic information, there continues to be a comprehensive array of service journalism about a community that the resident reader will both value and find to be accurate and trustworthy. This local “service” journalism, covers everything from the plan for the town’s harvest festival, to what’s happening on the local music and food scenes. This might seem unrelated to the trust issue but it is not. It is these topics that build the “shared reality” of a community. Everyone is concerned about the potholes on Main Street. Service journalism might better be considered “cohesion” journalism.

Several years ago, Stanford University coordinated a mega study on various interventions that could help with divisiveness. The top ranked intervention was to engage the community on non-controversial subjects in order to build the trust that is necessary in addressing controversial issues. Addressing the pothole problem is far more unifying that raising taxes to pay for new schools. This might be part of what I think of as an “aikido-informed strategy” for journalism. Use non-controversial issues to build trust to better address the tough, controversial issues.

Another recommendation of the Stanford megastudy suggested that in holding discussions about controversial subjects, we should involve exemplars who have gained respect across the political spectrum. These voices will more likely use less controversial language and avoid ad hominem attacks. Demonization is the enemy of constructive dialog. It acts as a barrier to compromise.

Let’s also give consideration to the use of language. Janet Coats, a linguistics researcher and managing director of the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida, found in her research on the coverage of the George Floyd protests that verbs describing protest actions repeatedly drew comparisons to fire or destruction (e.g., spark, fuel, erupt, trigger, ignite). Professor Coats poses the critical questions: is the recurrent use of fiery language a deliberate choice, or a subconscious pattern? What impact does it have on the perception of political demonstrations and their participants? How might it fuel the partisan divide?

Language matters. Linguistics matters. Politicians know this. They spend lavishly on message testing to identify words and phrases that elicit desired responses, whether hope or fear. Therefore, it would be prudent to adopt a more cautious approach to impartial language, informing the audience without consciously or unconsciously obscuring reasoned arguments with emotion-laden phrasing. The field of journalism should embrace linguistic study, assessing the impact of the terms and phrases we employ and considering the effects of amplifying false narratives propagated by the politicians we cover.

The movement of fact-checking organizations is driven by the fundamental belief that providing corrective information can help counter disinformation. However, the context of engagement is crucial. How does the audience react to a fact check appearing on their social network feed compared to its appearance in a list of search results? Research I reviewed at Google indicated a significant difference. In the social network context, a fact check next to a relative’s misinformed post challenges the user’s social construct. This puts the user on the defensive, clouding their willingness to accept or consider the fact check. The search engine context is quite different. Search is a private experience where users ask questions they might be embarrassed to ask their partners, making them more open to new information. This isn’t a judgment about search engines versus social networks, but rather about the critical importance of the user’s context.

Let’s also consider the importance of statistical context. We navigate a landscape of distorted risk, often heading to the polls driven by unfounded fears of terrorism, crime, or other societal anxieties. For instance, we fear terrorism despite being 11,000 times more likely to die from heart disease, and we fear crime when we are 28 times more likely to die in a car accident. Errors in context can be more perilous than errors in fact. The absence of context might be an unconscious oversight in the rush of “breaking” news, often observed as “If it bleeds, it leads.” However, in some instances, it’s a deliberate act of fear-mongering. Regardless, incautious coverage, devoid of fact-based context, constitutes a form of misinformation. We can bridge the gap between irrational and rational fear by providing more thoughtful context.

We assume our societies understand the role of journalism, and that its practice is intrinsically imbued with an ethical pursuit of “truth.” However, research tells us that societies neither understand this role nor inherently regard journalism with any more esteem than they do the sellers of timeshares.

The practice of journalism must consider how current approaches meet the dynamics of our times. We must better evolve journalism to convey its role in providing citizens with the information they need to be informed citizens. We must acknowledge that not all journalism is good journalism. We must acknowledge that it needs to be accomplished as individuals or collectively as a singular news source, not as a monolithic institution that does not exist. We must seek to earn trust across the broad spectrum of our complex contemporary society. We must consider how we build acceptance of objective facts, with a keen awareness of all the dimensions of context. Who is speaking? Is the horrific event an anomaly or a trend? Are we reporting with determined impartiality? Are we conveying the information with humility and empathy? Of greatest importance, are we displaying respect for the reader as much as we desire the reader to respect us?

Richard Gingras chairs the board of Village Media and is a co-founder and board member of the global Center for News, Technology, and Innovation. He recently retired from Google after 15 years, serving as the company’s global vice president for news, overseeing various product efforts as well as the Google News Initiative. Gingras also engaged on news-related public policy matters around the world. Gingras helped found Salon.com, the second digital pure play after Wired. He served as editor of two digital media properties, the first in 1980. Gingras serves on the boards of several journalism and policy related organizations, including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the International Center for Journalists, the First Amendment Coalition, the James W Foley Legacy Foundation, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and the advisory council of the Frontline documentary series.