The Trust Gap: Young People's Tactics for Assessing the Reliability of Political News

Abstract

In theories about journalism's democratic remit, trust is generally regarded as a prerequisite for public connection: only when citizens believe the news, they will engage with it and act upon it to perform their citizenship. Trust seems even more important in today's digital society, where the destabilization of journalism institutions and proliferation of sources make the media ecology increasingly complex to navigate. This paper challenges such conceptualizations of media trust rooted in rationality and deliberateness. Based on two series of semistructured interviews with fifty-five young people from ten nationalities living in the Netherlands, conducted in 2016 and 2017, we develop a taxonomy of people's tactics when assessing the reliability of news. We explore what this means for how they value news and how such judgments, drawing on explicit and tacit knowledge, impact their news use. Rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news, including affective and intuitive tactics rooted in tacit knowledge. Consequently, we argue that to fully understand how users deal with the complexity of trust in digital environments, we should not start from ideals of informed citizenship, but from people's actual practices and experiences instead.

Does Journalism Still Matter? The Role of Journalistic and non-Journalistic Sources in Young Peoples’ News Related Practices

“…Others reported that they used “content-specific strategies” (Tamboer et al 2020: 12) which includes checking sources or links as well as the writing style of a news item. In general, the young people from the focus groups placed importance on a range of features when determining which content is reliable, most of which relates to the strategies identified by Swart and Broersma (2021: 9). For example, in terms of the design, format, and tonality, ‘the writing style plays a large role’ said one (Jonas-17).…”

“…In this context, Vraga et al (2020: 2) argue that it is no longer clear “who is a ‘journalist,’ what is ‘news’ and where to place one's trust,” which goes some way to explain the ways in which journalism's role is changing in light of the emergence of digital and social media platforms. Second, the type of source affects young peoples’ practices in evaluating and engaging with news since they no longer expect online information to be reliable, objective, and fact-checked (Knight Foundation 2018: 8) and apply skills and knowledge to judge the reliability of information on their own which is an “increasingly complex task” (Swart and Broersma 2021: 2). Yet, previous studies mostly describe young peoples’ news consumption at the platform level and do not take into account different communicators and the sources they follow or subscribe to for information.…”

What Makes a Good Citizen Online? The Emergence of Discursive Citizenship Norms in Social Media Environments

“…People employ different strategies to handle information on social media (e.g., Koc-Michalska et al, 2020; Swart & Broersma, 2021). However, we found that people speak of some of these strategies in a normatively laden sense, seeing it as a civic duty not only to inform oneself but also to do so properly .…”

Why Media Systems Matter: A Fact-Checking Study of UK Television News during the Coronavirus Pandemic

“…However, Taneja and Yaeger's (2019) research of online news users discovered a positive relationship between a trusted source and enhanced user consumption. The complexity in which the public make judgements about the credibility of journalists and news was well articulated in Swart and Broersma's (2021) audience study, which highlighted the importance of examining people's practices and experiences of consumption rather than any normative ideals of how we expect citizens to act. UT-Austin's Centre for Media Engagement has led the way in understanding how audiences consume news in different environmental contexts.…”