O jornalismo enfrenta uma bem documentada crise de confiança. Este longo declínio da confiança do público na imprensa é parte de um cepticismo mais amplo acerca da confiabilidade das instituições, de um modo geral — levando a uma recessão global da confiança que preocupa observadores e faz com que se interroguem sobre o final desta espiral descendente. (Mark Coddington e Seth Lewis)
Journalism faces a well-documented crisis [1] of [2] trust [3]. This long-running decline in public confidence in the press is part of a broader skepticism that has developed about the trustworthiness of institutions more generally — leading to an overall trust recession that worries observers who speculate about the endgame of this downward spiral [4].
But might we see these issues of news and trust in a new light if we reconsidered our assumptions about what actually leads people to develop trust in journalism?
Consider, for example, how journalists for decades have sought to establish trust and confidence by focusing on their democratic responsibility to provide objective information — in which case, trust is presumed to be a product of faithfully adhering to standards and neutrality. In that case, reclaiming trust could be a matter of “getting back to basics,” as it were, and reporting facts in a way that more clearly communicates what people need to know, with the independence and distance that people have come to expect from journalists.
But if, in fact, journalists were to switch their mind-set and understand their primary role differently as the facilitation of public deliberation, community connection, and democratic participation — of working with civil society as opposed to apart from it — what would that mean for the overall orientation of journalism and how it works?
A new study [5] in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly — by Megan L. Zahay, Kelly Jensen, Yiping Xia, and Sue Robinson, all of the University of Wisconsin-Madison — offers some essential insights on this question. The team, led by Robinson and applying Zahay’s training as a rhetorician, interviewed 42 journalists, about half of them designated “engagement-oriented” and the others “traditionally oriented.” Based on a rhetorical analysis of what these journalists said (via the interviews) as well as what they did (via hundreds of pages of website materials and social media conversation threads), the authors developed a picture of two camps of journalists — both deeply concerned about the crisis of trust in journalism, but each with very divergent ideas about what should be done about it.
For traditionally oriented journalists, trust is achieved by transmitting facts and helping people perform their democratic duties, without any particular public participation involved in that process. Fixing the trust problem, in this view, means doubling down on objectivity, transparency, and accuracy — but in a way that helps citizens to more readily recognize the value that such things provide. By contrast, rather than focusing on institutionalized norms as the defining elements of journalism, “engagement-oriented journalists view [journalism] as a set of relationships, prone to complexity and messiness, and they expect this in the contexts in which they work.”
What’s especially striking about the engagement view, Zahay and colleagues argue, is that it implies not just a different mind-set about one’s role but also a transformation in one’s work—the stuff of day-to-day labor, or what they call “the labor of building trust.” A focus on building and maintaining relationships thus suggests “entirely new kinds of journalistic labor that reorient reporters’ attention toward collaboration and facilitation.” From this perspective, public trust in news flows out of efforts that emphasize mutual understanding and empathy with communities — and which may be inherently slow, gradual, and long-term by nature. In the words of a cofounder of an engagement organization who was interviewed, “[I]t’s ineffective to double down on ‘Trust me, I’m a journalist’ . . . If you’re not in relationship with someone, if you haven’t proved your value to them . . . then you don’t have trust.”
By now, there is a large and growing body of research about the possibilities and challenges of engaged journalism [6]. These approaches, in fact, have a long history, going back to the public and citizen journalism movements of the 1990s. But what sets this latest study apart is in how it carefully charts what appears to be a key inflection point in the profession—one that even seems, in the authors’ conclusion, “paradigmatic.” Indeed, this piece is the first to be published out of Robinson’s multi-phased, ongoing book project about how journalists trust “regular people” according to their various identities.
To the extent that we’re beginning to see a decisive split in how journalists define and enact their democratic role — and to the degree that news organizations give individual journalists the freedom and encouragement to act this way and engage trust-building experiments — we may be witnessing a meaningful movement away from the institutional model of critical distance and toward an engagement model of facilitating discussion, building community, and partnering with the public.
Mark Coddington e Seth Lewis – RQ1