Full Description
Around the world, journalism is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Public confidence in the news is declining; populist leaders attack the media; and journalists are routinely harassed and threatened. Many journalists and scholars believe that building trust with audiences would help weather these storms. But what do journalists risk in their pursuit of trust?
This book provides a fresh perspective by demonstrating how the desire to increase trust in the news can be weaponized against journalists. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly one hundred journalists, Does Trust Matter? challenges widely held assumptions about audience feedback that leave the media vulnerable to manipulation. Efrat Nechushtai shows how concerns over distrust have been used to increase favorable coverage of illiberal movements. She documents how the quest for public approval has led journalists to legitimize antiscience claims in the United States, racialize crime reporting in Germany, and produce "patriotic" stories in Hungary and Israel, among other cases.
Does Trust Matter? offers timely insights into how journalists can build resilience against increasingly sophisticated attempts to undermine their work, including AI-powered influence campaigns and online propaganda. Valuable for scholars and practitioners alike, this book presents practical strategies that reporters, editors, and publishers can use to navigate today's challenging environment.
Contents
Introduction: In Trust We Trust: The Case for Journalistic Self-Defense
1. The Challenge of Meaning: What We Talk About When We Talk About Trust in the News
2. The Challenge of Origin: Manufacturing Distrust to Manipulate Journalists
3. The Challenge of Values: When the Bad Actor Is the Audience
4. Journalistic Self-Defense in Practice: What Journalists and Publishers Can Do
5. From Trust to Trustworthiness: Journalism in an Era of Illiberal Politics
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Methodology
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
