Seeing Eye to Eye: A Comparison of Audiences’ and Journalists’ Perceptions of Professional Roles and How They Relate to Trust

ABSTRACT

The “gap” between journalist and audience expectations could be one reason why news media credibility is generally low. Journalistic expectations are often explored through analysis of the news worker’s role in society. One understudied topic in roles literature is perceptions of newer contextual reporting roles that consider society’s best interests: reporting in a socially responsible manner, alerting the public of threats and opportunities, accurately portraying the world, and contributing to society’s well-being. A representative survey of 1047 U.S. residents demonstrated audience perceptions of these contextual roles and more traditional journalistic roles. Responses were then compared to similar surveys of news professionals. Findings indicate that U.S. audiences diverge from journalists—especially newspaper/online journalists—in their role estimations, including more positive evaluations of adversarial and political roles. However, the order of role preference was largely similar among the groups, and both citizens and journalists highly valued contextual roles. Subsequent analyses showed that audience role perceptions influenced news trust more than demographics such as political ideology. Citizen belief in adversarial and disseminator journalistic roles strongly predicted greater trust in news reports.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalistic roles
• contextual journalism
• media trust
• news audiences
• quantitative
• survey

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The individual roles making up each larger function are listed in Table 1 and are further explained on page 7 in the Measures section.

2 For more details on the television and newspaper/online journalist samples and the methods used to gather them, see: Abdenour, McIntyre, and Dahmen (2018); McIntyre, Dahmen, and Abdenour (2018).

3 In previous “American Journalist” surveys (Weaver et al. 2007), the role of setting the political agenda was included in the populist mobilizer function, but in the latest survey, this role was moved to the adversarial function (Willnat, Weaver, and Wilhoit 2017).

4 Statistical diagnostics showed a small possibility of collinearity between the populist mobilizer and interpretive predictors in the regression model. However, the tolerance level for both variables was greater than .25, indicating that they could be safely used as independent predictors (Menard 1995; Tabachnick and Fidell 2007).