Abstract
Despite the central role that ordinary citizens play as ‘trustors’ (i.e. the actor that places trust) in the literature on news media trust, prior quantitative studies have paid little attention to how ordinary citizens understand and define news media trust. Here, trust tends to be studied from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective. To address this gap, we investigate how the public describes news media trust in their own words by asking them directly. We analyse 1500 written responses collected through a Norwegian online probability-based survey, here using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM). We find that citizens’ own understanding of news media trust can be categorised into four distinct topics that, in some instances, are comparable to academic and professional discourse. We show that citizens’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by many of the same variables that prior research has found to be important predictors of levels of trust. Respondents’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by education and satisfaction with democracy but not other known predictors of trust, such as ideological self-placement and political preferences.
Highlights
A considerable body of research has investigated the causes and effects of trust in news media (e.g. Engelke et al, 2019; Kiousis, 2001; Ladd, 2012; Prochazka and Schweiger, 2019; Tsfati and Ariely, 2014), successfully tapping into the multiple dimensions of trust derived from theory (e.g. Appelman and Sundar, 2016; Kohring and Matthes, 2007; Metzger et al, 2003; Roberts, 2010)
The present study provides the first in-depth, large-scale analysis of an open-ended question about how the public understands trust in media, here by using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM) to analyse the open-ended survey responses and how they vary systematically with respondent characteristics
From the selected STM run, we found that Norwegian citizens wrote about four different topics
Summary
A considerable body of research has investigated the causes and effects of trust in news media (e.g. Engelke et al, 2019; Kiousis, 2001; Ladd, 2012; Prochazka and Schweiger, 2019; Tsfati and Ariely, 2014), successfully tapping into the multiple dimensions of trust derived from theory (e.g. Appelman and Sundar, 2016; Kohring and Matthes, 2007; Metzger et al, 2003; Roberts, 2010). Because the majority of quantitative research on news media trust deals with responses to close-ended questions along a scale or from pre-established categories from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective, we still lack quantitative data on how citizens understand and describe news media trust, how such understandings vary and how different factors drive such differences To address this gap, we contribute to the growing body of journalism research focusing on audiences (Swart et al, 2017) by examining what words people draw on when asked to explain what trust in news media means to them and, in extension, the reasons they offer regarding trust and mistrust in journalism. We glean a small part of ‘the culturally available symbolic resources that people used to make sense of journalism’ (Nielsen, 2016) These theories are informative of how citizens make sense of the institution of news media in their everyday lives
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