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ABSTRACT
This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.
Acknowledgements
This study is part of the PROFECI research project (‘Mediating the Future: The Social Dynamics of Public Projections’, http://profeci.net/). We are indebted to Michal Salamon, Shahar Birotker, Keshet Galili, Dina Michaely, Aviv Mor, and Sonia Olvovsky who worked as research assistants for this project, and to Naama Weiss Yaniv and Adiba Abu Sakha for the coordination of the project. We would also like to thank Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Yariv Tsfati, Nikki Usher, Christian Pentzold, Michal Hamo, Roni Danziger, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and the members of the ‘Israeli Discourse Forum’ for their enlightening comments and suggestions in different phases of this study. Finally, we wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Journalism Studies for their valuable comments on this manuscript.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The study is part of the PROFECI research project which examines the social dynamics of media projections (ERC Grant 802990).
2 Within the extensive US media market, we used large datasets of political journalists (Usher, Holcomb, and Littman Citation2018), and of news and social media influencers (https://www.cision.com; https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/04/twitters-most-influential-political-journalists-205510). Additionally, we sampled journalists with high numbers of Facebook/Twitter followers (more than 500,000/ 100,000 in the US and Israel, respectively), and journalists who were recommended in a survey we conducted with journalism and political communication experts (N = 20, 10 US, 10 IL, April 2020).
3 Data about newspersons’ seniority is based on Wikipedia.
4 The full corpus comprised interviews with journalists, pollsters, and experts. In this study we used the 10 interviews with journalists who work for Israeli news outlets.
5 Square brackets were added by the authors. Each quote contains information about the outlet, date, and country (IL/US).
6 The quotes included in this article were translated into English by the authors.