A Qualitative Analysis of the Mechanisms Underlying the “Trust Nexus”

• In Event: The Drivers and Variations of Media Trust and Distrust

Abstract

A growing body of work has found evidence of a strong link or “nexus” between public trust in political institutions and the press in general (Ariely, 2015; Hanitzsch, Van Dalen, & Steindl, 2017; Knudsen, Nordø, & Iversen, 2023; Tsfati & Ariely, 2014; Tsfati & Cohen, 2005). But why should people have similar attitudes towards political institutions and the news media? Our empirical understanding of why this nexus exists is limited. While studies have proposed various explanations for this strong correlation—e.g., growing anti-elite sentiment, increasing mediatization of politics, growing audience awareness of the interplay between politics and media (Hanitzsch et al., 2017)—research examining how audiences actually think about the relationship between politics and news is limited (see Palmer, Toff, & Nielsen, 2020for an exception). Furthermore, this association runs counter to understandings of journalism as having an adversarial relationship with politicians, an ideal held by many within the journalistic profession and often supported by studies examining the relationship between politicians and journalists (e.g., Brants, de Vreese, Möller, & van Praag, 2010) or news coverage about politicians (e.g., Cappella & Jamieson, 1997).

In this paper, we expand our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the trust nexus, drawing on two rounds of qualitative data collection—in-depth interviews and focus groups—in four countries across the Global North and South: Brazil, India the United Kingdom, and the United States. We suggest that this connection is sustained through both conscious beliefs and inadvertent associations. On the one hand, some audiences espoused concrete ideas about (1) journalists and politicians being complicit or in cahoots; (2) journalists being controlled or paid off by politicians; (3) journalists being the same “kinds” of people as politicians. On the other hand, others seemed to link politicians and journalists less through specific beliefs about questionable motives than through inadvertent associations, either (4) conflating journalists and politicians when speaking about either or (5) confusing news coverage of political issues with the issue itself. Indeed, for many people, their only interaction with politics is through news, making the two hard to distinguish.



References

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Authors

• Amy Ross Arguedas, University of Oxford

• Sayan Banerjee, Texas Tech University

• Camila Mont'Alverne, University of Strathclyde

• Benjamin Toff, University of Minnesota

• Richard Fletcher, University of Oxford

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford