Only trust links people and truth

Only trust links people and truth

October 13, 2010, 6:18 am
Filed under: News Media, Social Media | Tags: credibility, links, trust, truth

Less than 30 percent of readers believe the news gets the facts straight, while less than 20 percent believe the news deals fairly with all sides of an issue*.

What I draw from these statistics is that people don’t trust the news because they perceive it as biased. [Other interpretations strongly encouraged in the comments.] They’re probably right, but even if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter.  If the news were true, but people didn’t see it as such, it wouldn’t make any shred of a difference.

The truth might be the news’ first priority, but news media must be about trust first and truth second.  For people to believe the truth you tell them, they have to trust you.  So how does one generate trust?

One unsettlingly popular answer among today’s news media is manipulation.

A more tenable one is by sheer brute force.  Eliminate doubt, the shadow of doubt, the sun that casts the shadow of doubt and Ms. Doubtfire herself, if necessary.  Attribute everything.  Leave no pronoun, statistic, reference, source, whatever un-hyperlinked.

People have always had access to most information, the news media has just monitored it for a living.  The time and energy spent to get that information was certainly too much to ask of the citizenry in the Pre-Digital Era, and the one-way news mediums were such that enabling public participation was essentially impossible.  Trust in the media was part of the social contract.

The web has torn apart that contract.  Access to information is at people’s fingertips.  And now, just because the Washington Post reports something doesn’t actually make it any more credible.  Look at the example below:

Mexico’s drug traffickers are likely to lose customers in America’s largest pot consuming state if California legalizes marijuana, but they won’t lose much money overall because California’s residents already prefer to grow their own, according to a study released Tuesday.

Personally I’m a Post believer, but clearly most of the country isn’t.  With today’s technology at their disposal, it’s shocking that the WaPo doesn’t link to that study. It’s unbelievably, ridiculously, preposterously easy to take the reader to the primary source.  That simple effort necessarily dispels some doubt, maybe not about the content, but at least about you.  It’s a measure of good faith: Don’t just take me at my word, let me show you.

The news media’s feelings must be hurt.  Nobody likes them.  Nobody believes anything they say.  And quite honestly, it’s through no fault of their own.  But just because they didn’t do anything wrong doesn’t mean they can’t do right to fix it.

More on this next week.

*Source: Pew Research Center Press Accuracy Rating

2 Comments

2 Comments so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI