Trusting Others: A Pareto Distribution of Source and Message Credibility Among News Reporters

Abstract

This study uses the case study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, between source and message credibility evaluations, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings show that journalists can distinguish source and message credibility. However, in practice they rely on source evaluations as an “autopilot” default mode, shifting gears to observations of source and message credibility in epistemically complex cases. The proportion between both is close to Pareto distribution. This extreme division challenges both inductive and mixed inference theories of epistemic trust and suggests revisiting the “typification” doctrine of newswork. Data partially support the hegemony and “epistemic injustice” theory, showing that traditional credibility criteria might trigger the exclusion of nontraditional voices.

Keywords

trust knowledge journalism news sources mix method

Introduction

The role of trust as a precondition for the viability and functioning of societies is preoccupying numerous scholars in fields such as psychology, sociology, economy, and philosophy (e.g., Nikolova et al., 2015; Thibaut, 2017; Wintterlin, 2017; Yeo & Green, 2017). Almost all scholars tend to idolize the idea of trusting others, as it is vital for democracy (Foster & Frieden, 2017), for conducting business (Nikolova et al., 2015), generating social capital, restraining public corruption (Newton, 2001), and establishing knowledge about the world (Simmel, 1908/1950; Thibaut, 2017).

Yet, the reasons why people trust, whom they trust, as well as the implications of their decision to trust have changed significantly in recent years following digitalization, and new social and political trends (Blöbaum, 2016; Botsman, 2017; Kitchin, 2014; Yeo & Green, 2017). For example, recent studies have observed that trust is shifting from institutions to individuals (Botsman, 2017), even to unfamiliar ones, who traditionally had to work much harder to gain trust. As trust is affecting almost every walk of life—from choosing a restaurant to deciding how to vote and whether to vaccinate one’s offspring (Abrams & Travaglino, 2018)—understanding such shifts is a key challenge for various disciplines.

Communication studies have a special interest in trust. Primarily, this is because trust is one of the most important factors in any communication process, not only on the social level but also between individuals (Thibaut, 2017). As a result, it is relevant for many subfields of research, from mass communication (e.g., Newman et al., 2017; Usher, 2018), through political communication (Hopkin & Rosamond, 2018), to communication technology (Kitchin, 2014).

Another important reason why trust is so important for communication scholars, especially in an era of fake-news and post-truth (Hopkin & Rosamond, 2018), can be found in the observations of social epistemologists, according to whom most of what people know in modern societies is based on trusting others rather than their own faculties (Carter et al., 2018; Hardwig, 1991). Relying on testimonies of friends and family, news outlets, or browsing social media are all communicative actions. Dependence on communicated realities is especially severe as far as public affairs and political matters are concerned since most people are physically and socially remote from the events themselves.

Despite their relative abundance, studies of trust in communication leave three main gaps. The first is conceptual: lacking one accepted definition for trust, many communication studies didn’t make the critical distinction between trust in sources and trust in messages, that is reconsidered per case, even if some messages arrive from the same source—an important distinction that was made in other disciplines a long time ago (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2007; see also philosopher David Hume, 1748/1999). Although some communication scholars, such as Appelman and Sundar (2016) and Metzger et al. (2003), highlighted the differences between both types of trust, no empirical studies took the pains to juxtapose or compare their roles. The second is the rationale gap: most studies used a single, quantitative method—usually surveys or experiments (e.g., Blom, 2018; Hanitzsch & Berganza, 2012; Pingree et al., 2013) that do not allow deeper understanding of why people trust certain people and information and not others.

Lastly, the theoretical gap: communication studies tend to ignore the philosophical literature on the epistemic roles of trust, focusing exclusively on social or psychological theories. The contribution of the philosophical literature becomes crucial when considering the idolization of trust. While communication studies present an almost consensual desire for more trust (e.g., Newman et al., 2017; Usher, 2018), critical philosophers (e.g., Alcoff, 2001; Fricker, 2007) provide conceptual tools to expose the hazards embedded in this naïve approach.

Journalists’ trust in their sources, the focus of the current paper, might be strategic for other disciplines as well. Beyond their crucial role as primary informers in democratic societies, journalists are professional allocators of trust in a jungle of misleading and self-serving sources (Wintterlin, 2017). Paradoxically, they need to trust their sources daily to perform their jobs (Wintterlin, 2017) while being aware that these sources are inherently biased, having much to gain or lose from the resulting publications (D. Berkowitz & TerKeurst, 1999).

To overcome the limitations of previous studies, this article differentiates between source and message credibility, based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative reconstruction interviews (Reich & Barnoy, in press), using theories of philosophy to interpret the findings. In the quantitative part, reporters were asked to reconstruct how they evaluated the credibility of more than a thousand news sources (N = 1,307) versus the credibility of each of their messages. In the qualitative part, we asked them to reflect on the reasons why they evaluated sources and messages the way they did and how this allocation of credibility affected their work process and knowledge about the state of affairs behind the stories.

The following section starts by reviewing the definitions of trust, we then juxtapose source versus message credibility and discuss trust predictors and the relation between trust and knowledge, as well as the social and epistemic implications of trust-related evaluations.

Literature Review

Although studied extensively for more than a decade, there is no consensus about the definition of trust and its basic traits (Botsman, 2017; D. H. McKnight & Chervany, 1996). Even the terms aren’t unanimous, shifting between trustworthiness (e.g., Deprez & Van Leuven, 2018; Wintterlin, 2017), believability (Blom, 2018), and credibility (e.g., Dunwoody & Ryan, 1987; McComas & Trumbo, 2001; Reich, 2011). In this study, we will use the term trust while operationalizing it empirically by referring to credibility—as in most studies of journalists’ trust in sources.

The inconsistent use of terminology among scholars is probably due to the fact that according to some definitions, all three terms—trust, trustworthiness, and credibility—refer to the same attribute from different perspectives (Blöbaum, 2016; Botsman, 2017). While trustworthiness is described at times as an objective measure, relating to the extent to which a trustee’s testimony is true or not, credibility refers to trustor’s perceptions of the trustee’s trustworthiness. Trust denotes the practical decision to rely on the perceived trustworthiness (i.e., credibility) of the trustee, whether manifested in an action, in shaping an attitude or in an adoption of a belief (Castelfranchi & Falcone, 2005; Rousseau et al., 1998). Since this study relies on interviewees’ testimonies, without examining messages’ veracity, we adhere to the terms “trust” and “credibility,” avoiding the use of “trustworthiness.”

The literature suggests much more complex replies to the questions “what is trust?” Is it a feeling, an activity, a “psychological state” (Rousseau et al., 1998, p. 395), a “mental state, an attitude” (Castelfranchi & Falcone, 2005, p. 801), belief or something else (Blöbaum, 2016; D. H. McKnight & Chervany, 1996)? There is a relatively broad agreement that trust arises between at least two actors (Blöbaum, 2016) and that trustors’ decisions are often made instinctively and instantly, based on some level of judgment regarding the trustworthiness of the trustee, trustor, and the message (Blöbaum, 2016), as well as on prior knowledge (D. H. McKnight & Chervany, 1996). Trust is also bound to power relations, prejudice, and bias (Alcoff, 2001). Putting trust in someone implies the “willingness” of the trustor “to be vulnerable” to the trustee (Mayer et al., 1995, p. 712).

How do these characteristics apply to the specific context of journalism? On the individual level, if trust arises between two actors, in journalism, these would be the two protagonists—the reporter and the source. Most of the time they maintain long-lasting relationships and they rarely meet for the first time (Tiffen et al., 2014). On the occupational level, if trust is indeed formed instantly and instinctively, it fits journalists’ tendency to make snap decision based on gut-feeling (Schultz, 2007), especially under increasing time pressures (Lund, 2012). On the institutional level, journalism in general as a social institution is bound to social power relations both in its susceptibility to pressures of numerous social actors on one hand and its strong impact of collectives and individuals on the other hand (B. Berkowitz, 2008; Hall et al., 1978).

To clarify what do journalists evaluate when they allocate trust, we juxtapose two types of evaluations of trustors: the credibility of the source (the trustee) and the credibility of the message.

Source Credibility Versus Message Credibility

While hegemonic scholars of journalism emphasize the supremacy of sources as “primary definers” of reality (B. Berkowitz, 2008; Gitlin, 1980; Hall et al., 1978), exchange theories that perceive reporter–source relations as a commercial transaction give more weight to the messages, or the exchanged information and its perceived veracity (Appelman & Sundar, 2016; Gans, 1979; Manning, 2001; McManus, 1994). Some recent communication studies explored both source and message credibility (Blom, 2018); however, sourcing studies tend to focus exclusively on source credibility (e.g., Gans, 1979; Reich, 2011; Tiffen et al., 2014; Wintterlin, 2017; Yoon, 2005).

The question what people should assess, the source of “testimony” (to use the epistemic jargon) or its content—the messages (to use communication jargon)—has intrigued philosophy literature as well. Ideally, when one wishes to establish knowledge based on others’ say-so, both the sources and the messages should be scrutinized (Adler, 1994; Koenig & Harris, 2007). However, many epistemologists acknowledge that this is an unrealistic expectation. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1748/1999) suggested that trust develops from childhood when people have opportunities to test the correspondence between the testimonies they hear from parents, siblings, teachers, and so on, and the actual states of affairs they experience through their faculties or based on their developing logic. This way, people learn to assume, by default, that most people can be trusted most of the time.

To test Hume’s hypothesis, empirical studies in psychology examined the evolution of children’s trust (e.g., Clément, 2010; Koenig & Harris, 2007; Mascaro & Sperber, 2009; Shafto et al., 2012). Clément (2010) found that children develop critical thinking, distrusting and screening not only noncredible sources but also contradictory information. Mascaro and Sperber (2009) found that even before they understand the concept of deception, children learn to prefer benevolent sources. Categorizing credible and noncredible sources is considered as a cognitively efficient process, allowing one to avoid the need to scrutinize each message independently (Castelfranchi & Falcone, 2005). We trust instinctively, preferring to avoid critical examination of information whenever possible.

If children can distinguish between source and message credibility, shouldn’t we expect adults to be able to do so? Not necessarily. In the experiment of Rieh and Belkin (1998), almost all participants—PhD students and university faculty members—relied on source characteristics to evaluate the quality of information and avoided scrutinizing the credibility of their messages. If Hume is right, and people develop growing trust in others, then adults might be more trusting than children, even when they should be critical.

What should we expect of news reporters, as professional allocators of trust? On one hand, they are expected to rely heavily on source credibility to save time and energy (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1981; Ericson et al., 1989; Reich, 2011) and since credible sources share at least some responsibility for the published content (Ettema & Glasser, 1998; Fishman, 1980).

On the other hand, we may expect professional allocators of trust, who rely most of the time on inherently biased sources (Gans, 1979), to be able to distinguish source and message credibility, scrutinizing messages as well. Hence, even if most people can be trusted most of the time, news sources require extra caution due to the self-interest underlying their testimonies. This includes not only PR practitioners, who are often perceived by journalists as professional deceivers, and yet constitute the most prominent type of sources (Reich, 2011), but also politicians and officials, who have many reasons to be dishonest, or at least biased.

To explore the extent to which message credibility plays a role in day-to-day journalists’ decisions, as distinct from source credibility, we pose the first research question (RQ):

Research Question 1 (RQ1): To what extent do news reporters distinguish between message credibility and source credibility?

Whom and What to Trust

The logic behind the decision to trust a person or a statement, or to avoid such trust, intrigued scholars in several disciplines. Aristotle’s rhetoric is probably the oldest literature known on this matter, explaining how one can persuade another with ethos, logos, and pathos—which mostly refer to the message itself. The numerous “trust antecedents” (Wintterlin, 2017) mentioned in the research literature since can be divided into three main categories: characteristics of the trustee, the message, and the trustor.

The trustee

Trustee’s intentions, integrity, competence. or reputation are all potential predictors of trust mentioned in the literature, as well as the symbols of professionalism the trustee is carrying such as a doctor’s coat, an officer’s rank, or an expert titled “Dr.” (Wintterlin, 2017). Mayer et al. (1995) also mentioned the trustee’s levels of availability, loyalty, openness, and so on, which they narrowed down to three categories: ability, benevolence, and integrity. According to Castelfranchi and Falcone, 2000, both competence (which fits Mayer’s ability) and integrity (which includes Mayer’s benevolence and integrity) are “the real cognitive kernel of trust” (p. 802). Integrity refers to “the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor” (Mayer et al., 1995, p. 718). Competence refers to sources’ ability to provide the information or “fulfill their tasks” (Blöbaum, 2016, p. 11). These factors are always context-dependent: a physician is competent as long as he provides medical advice, not financial analysis.

How does one decide whether a source is benevolent and competent? Blöbaum (2016) suggests that both source benevolence and source competence can be assessed based on the position the source holds. In the case of journalism, relevant roles are the fact that one serves as a public relations practitioner, a senior source, or an academic. On the more collective level, trust can be allocated according to one’s affiliation to an organization or to a sector in society, such as government, private, or academic (Blöbaum, 2016). Familiar or reputable sources may also be perceived as more trustworthy (Wintterlin, 2017), yet the relations between familiarity and trust are complex: first, since familiarity might include negative experiences and lead to negative evaluations (Wintterlin, 2017); second, since the direction of causality isn’t clear—does familiarity make a source seem credible, or do people return to others they deemed credible?

The message

The most prominent message-oriented predictor of trust is coherence (Atwood, 1966; Wintterlin, 2017), that is, the extent to which the message is in tandem with prior information known to the hearer. Blom (2018) found that U.S. citizens’ decisions to trust immigration news were predicted by the congruence of the new messages with their prior expectations (news content expectancy). In a similar vein, we can expect the value of information to impact trust evaluations (Reich, 2011). If trust means “willingness to be vulnerable” (Mayer et al., 1995, p. 712) through greater reliance, then reporters might show greater willingness to allocate trust, the more the information is valued as important, interesting, or exclusive, or when information is based on a leak (Reich & Barnoy, 2016b).

The trustor

Predictors of trust, which depend on the hearer’s characteristics, are least commonly mentioned in the literature. In McGuire’s (1980) classic persuasion model, gaining one’s trust depends, among many other things, on the hearer’s personal and professional capabilities. In journalism, the relevant abilities might be reporter’s subject-matter expertise, whose proxy is being assigned to cover a single beat (vs. multi-beat reporters), as well as their years of experience and education (Moreira & Rodrigues Helal, 2009).

Based on these suggested predictors, we present the second RQ as follows:

Research Question 2 (RQ2): To what extent can reporters’ evaluations of source and of message credibility be explained by trustor, trustee, and message characteristics?

Trust and Knowledge

“Someone who knows all need not trust, someone who knows nothing cannot reasonably trust at all” (Simmel, 1908/1950, p. 346, translated in Blöbaum, 2016). The sociologist George Simmel’s assertion means that if one “knows” (i.e., has all the evidence needed to be certain that something is true), one doesn’t need to trust anyone. Trust is what allows one to act even when equipped with only partial knowledge (Luhmann, 2018). Most of our knowledge, according to social epistemologists, is based on trusting others’ testimonies, since people can hardly establish most of what they need to know based on their own faculties (Carter et al., 2018; Hardwig, 1991). However, epistemologists are divided as to whether epistemic trust—reliance on others’ testimonies to establish knowledge—is primarily inductive or based on a mix of inferences. Hume (1748/1999) and other induction philosophers after him (e.g., Coady, 1992; Foley, 1994) suggest that people trust primarily based on an accumulation of experiences in which others’ testimonies corresponded with facts. The more common mix inference model suggests that alongside the inductive source evaluations, people always rely on some deductive inference in their evaluations (Baldwin, 1993; Koenig & Harris, 2012) such as behavior monitoring or message coherence and rational evaluations (Hermes et al., 2018).

The criteria that people rely on in order to evaluate trust always involve some level of existing knowledge (D. H. McKnight & Chervany, 1996), such as—is this source an official? Does this source have the qualifications needed to provide such information? Even when people don’t have enough information, they can, according to Alcoff (2001, p. 5), make “ball-park” estimates of their source’s trustworthiness. They usually don’t know, for example, how the information behind the testimony was obtained (competence) and why is it conveyed now (benevolence). Hence, people make do with more general assessment criteria such as the testifier’s social affiliations (Alcoff, 2001)—role and sector and even gender and race.

How do we evaluate knowledge? According to the most widely accepted epistemic definition, knowledge is “true, justified belief” (Coady, 1992; Fricker, 2007). Accordingly, Ettema and Glasser (1998) suggested that exploring reporters’ knowledge could be done by focusing on their justifications for belief. So, do journalists “know”? Ideally, as “trustees” of wider audiences, journalists are expected to make sure that their reports are true by at least having solid justifications. However, in practice, their capacity to do so prior to any publication is questionable, especially due to the mounting pressures on current newsmakers (Lund, 2012). Journalists always relied heavily on trust to establish most of their knowledge and minimize reporting efforts (Gans, 1979). However, at least when they identify noncredible sources or messages, journalists are expected to make extra efforts to verify information by contacting more news sources (Barnoy & Reich, 2019). Such epistemic practices can not only reduce the risks of publication but also yield more knowledge.

To explore how trust affects reporters’ knowledge, we pose the third RQ as follows:

Research Question 3 (RQ3): To what extent do source and message credibility evaluations impact reporters’ news-making processes (reasons to employ or avoid epistemic practices) and their knowledge about the stories they report (justifications for beliefs regarding a story).

Method

Credibility evaluations are tricky to trace. Since trust is a psychological state (Rousseau et al., 1998), exploring it requires some reflection of the trustors, yet too much reflection might be detrimental, since as a social mechanism (Luhmann, 2018), trust evaluations are very sensitive to social desirability biases. For example, if you ask a reporter to evaluate how credible PR practitioners are, the expected evaluation would be lower than if you ask them to evaluate a specific practitioner they are familiar with (Reich, 2010).

To cope with these kinds of challenges, we used reconstruction interviews (Reich & Barnoy, 2016a), in which a sample of reporters were asked to recreate the news-making process behind a sample of their recently published items. Rather than trying to assess what they usually do, as is typical in free-floating interviews and surveys, reconstruction interviews ask journalists to recall what they did and thought in specific stories, regarding specific sources and messages. Furthermore, unlike constructed critical cases that try to put journalists in an artificial context of action, reconstruction interviews test real-life situations, under specific constraints and temporal and social contexts. Reporters’ replies are recorded in a structured matrix that records in detail every actor, actant, and activity in a highly granular mode, whereby the unit of analysis is the individual source, technology, and practice.

This study covers, for the first time, both source and message credibility and the interplay between them, as former studies have recommended (Appelman & Sundar, 2016). Furthermore, unlike the quantitative approach of most former studies, the current one included a substantial qualitative component in order to indicate causal relations between credibility evaluations and other factors and expose the logic and reasoning behind the allocation of credibility in reporters’ own words.

Interviews

Reconstruction interviews were conducted in two waves. The first, with a quantitative questionnaire, was dedicated to recreating the credibility judgments of the reporters in a sample of items and their role in the processes of news production. The second, qualitative wave was dedicated to recording reporters’ reflections on the logic behind their judgments and activities.

During the quantitative reconstructions, each reporter was asked to reconstruct the trust allocation and the production process behind seven of his or her recently published news items, all and all 480 items covering 1,307 news sources. The interviews were conducted in different locations across Israel between October 2016 and August 2017 (more on the item sampling in Supplemental Appendix 1).

Interviews were conducted face-to-face (except for two telephone interviews with reporters who couldn’t meet) one news item at a time, with the reporter and the interviewer sitting on both sides of a table: the reporter with a tablet containing his or her recent publications and the researcher with a tablet on which the questionnaires were completed, according to the reporter’s replies. The interviewees were asked to detail in generalized categories (e.g., senior male source, female PR, etc.) the identity of the sources behind each news item and reconstruct the evaluation of their credibility and the credibility of their messages (more on the formation of the questionnaire in Supplemental Appendix 1).

The second wave of interviews included a series of 25 follow-up qualitative interviews with a sub-sample of reporters who had participated in the first stage. They reconstructed 50 news items (two items each). The sampling was purposive, in accordance with the standards of qualitative research, selecting interviewees who addressed three criteria: showed adequate verbal and reflective skills in the first interview; published at least one item with a factual disagreement; and was willing to participate in a second interview. The interview format was almost identical, conducted face-to-face, in most cases during the month following the original interview (four interviews were conducted within 3 months after the interview due to reporters’ unavailability).

Data Analysis

The quantitative analysis started with a simple comparison of source and message credibility, testing the correlation between them and breaking down all sources and messages into four groups (high and low credibility combinations). To test which factors predict credibility, two models were built using logistical regressions: the first to predict source credibility and the second to predict message credibility—both using trustor-, trustee-, and message-related variables. The qualitative analysis was performed based on the seven-stage thematic analysis model of Kacen and Krumer-Nevo (2010): (1) a holistic reading of each qualitative interview transcript and of the answers to the follow-up questions; (2) organization of data and reduction to initial categories, such as reasons to doubt a source, the effect of noncredible sources, and so on; (3) breakdown into specific themes, marking statements that could explain or contextualize the statistical findings; (4) rebuilding the themes and adjusting the phrasing (specific names of themes, for example) based on a comparison of the research’s original theoretical goals and its existing findings; (5) an additional holistic reading of the entire data in its original raw form; (6) re-examination of themes to verify and adjust them—the latter stage included a juxtaposition of the quantitative and qualitative findings; and (7) the writing stage, which differed from other qualitative studies due to the need to merge the qualitative and quantitative data.

Measurements

Trust/credibility

Trust is the practical decision of an interviewee to rely on the credibility—that is, the perceived trustworthiness—of sources (SC) and messages (MC), according to reporters’ ranking for each source and information exchange, on a 6-point scale, ranging from 1 = extremely noncredible to 6 = extremely credible. SC and MC were recoded as dichotomous variables (1–3 marking noncredible sources/messages, 4–6 credible ones) for the categorical division and the regressions.

Reasoning for trust

Reporters’ explanations behind their credibility evaluations include general statements regarding their decisions to trust or doubt a certain source or message.

Predictors of trust

A series of source (trustee), reporter (trustor), and message (information) characteristics that may predict source credibility and message credibility, as detailed below.

Source characteristics

Source’s role (e.g., PR practitioner, senior organizational source, expert, etc.), sector in society (e.g., government, private, civil, etc.), and gender (male, female, other/unknown) (Alcoff, 2001; Blöbaum, 2016). These three were recoded as dichotomous for the logistical regression, comparing the largest category (PR, Government, and Male) to all the others. Regular sources are those who interact with the reporter at least once a month, and others were categorized as occasional (Wintterlin, 2017). Triggering source—the first to provide information in a particular item, followed by news gathering sources (McManus, 1994).

Trustor/reporter characteristics

Relevant education—a completed or ongoing degree in either communication, journalism school, or a particular field related to the reporter’s beat (e.g., economy for financial reporter; Moreira & Rodrigues Helal, 2009). Single/multi-beat reporters—according to the number of beats, the reporter was assigned to (Reich, 2011). Experienced reporter—working more than the average number of years in our sample (15 and above; Moreira & Rodrigues Helal, 2009).

Message characteristics

Level of importance and interest—on a 6-point scale, ranging from 1 = extremely unimportant/uninteresting to 6 = extremely important/interesting (Mayer et al., 1995; Reich, 2011). Recoded as dichotomous (1–3 as unimportant/uninteresting vs. 4–6 as important/interesting). Planned events—for example, a press conference, procedural processes, court hearing, and so on; all others were categorized as unplanned (e.g., accident and terror attacks; Mayer et al., 1995; Reich, 2011). Exclusive items—in which at least half of the information was passed only to the interviewee to the best of her knowledge (Mayer et al., 1995; Reich, 2011). Leaked information—an unofficial and unauthorized disclosure of information (Reich & Barnoy, 2016b). Conflicting/consonant message—a factual disagreement between sources’ versions (Atwood, 1966; Reich & Barnoy, 2019; Wintterlin, 2017).

Knowledge

A version of a story that was deemed by the journalist to be truthful and justified by source and/or message credibility, or by other justifications (Barnoy & Reich, 2019; Coady, 1992; Fricker, 2007). The contribution of trust to knowledge was detected qualitatively in two ways: first, by highlighting in the interview data any explicit association made by an interviewee between knowledge and source or message credibility; second, by examining whether source or message credibility was mentioned when we asked interviewees to justify their belief that a certain version of a story was true and to explain why they decided to employ a specific knowledge-equitation practice (such as verification) or avoid doing so.

Results

Findings explore, side by side, how source and message credibility are shaping the news, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative reconstruction interviews. The synergy of both methods, used here for the first time, served to highlight the findings of each method, enhance the explanatory and causal insights, and corroborate major findings.

Distinguishing Message From Source Credibility

The first RQ focused on the extent to which reporters discriminate between SC and MC when they receive particular information from a particular source. Our findings show high correlations between source and message credibility (r_s = .65, p < .01). Out of 1,049 cases in which reporters rated both source and message credibility, only 9% were contrasting evaluations—that is, involving messages that were evaluated as noncredible despite their reliance on sources that were evaluated as credible—and vice versa, as summarized in Table 1. In addition, in more than two third of the cases, the grades were identical (67.2%).

Table 1.

SC and MC Basic Combinations.

Combination	N (sources/messages)	%
High SC—high MC	906	86
High SC—low MC	30	3
Low SC—high MC	64	6
Low SC—low MC	49	5
Total	1,049	100

Note. Both SC and MC were evaluated by our interviewees on a scale of 1–6 (1 = extremely noncredible, 6 = extremely credible). The data were recoded so 1–3 was coded as low and 4–6 as high. In eight cases, either SC or MC evaluation was missing. SC = source credibility; MC = message credibility.

Why do reporters avoid an independent evaluation for the messages in most cases? The qualitative interviews reveal that reporters not only rarely distinguish between SC and MC but also that most interviewees resist the idea of making such a distinction. Reporters’ were asked to explain cases of conflicting credibility evaluations—when, in the quantitative stage, they rated sources as highly credible and their information noncredible, or vice versa (in total, amounting to less than 10% of the cases).

In their replies, we identified two main—although contradicting—themes. According to the causal explanation, expressed by almost all interviewees who participated in the qualitative stage, it is unreasonable to separate SC and MC since the former “causes” the latter. “[A] credible source will provide me with reliable information, because the reliability of his message is mostly determined by who he is. That is what credible sources do—they tell the truth, they don’t lie,” explained an interviewee. “This is the ideal way to assess a message, based on its origin.” “If she (a news source) is a credible person,” explained another,

she will tell me what really happened, even if it doesn’t serve her interest in this particular case . . . but problematic sources (i.e., noncredible), everything they say—I doubt, even if it sounds like the truth, their messages are by default less credible.

The correlative explanation was supported by a minority of interviewees. “In most cases the two [SC and MC] are similar, but this doesn’t mean they always match,” reflected one interviewee. “Noncredible sources can say the truth, and credible sources might be wrong.” Some interviewees saw the distinction between both variables as a professional ideal: “My responsibility, as a professional journalist, is to always ask myself: can I trust what my source is saying in this specific case?” explained one interviewee. “This can obviously go both ways,” recounted another:

someone that I don’t trust, maybe even don’t know, can tell me something that makes a lot of sense—the fact that he or she often lies, doesn’t mean that in this particular case I should automatically doubt what they say. That would be unprofessional.

Hence, our reply to RQ1 is that in their daily practice, news reporters do not distinguish between SC and MC in the great majority of cases, although in theory they can. Moreover, their nondiscriminatory judgment of SC and MC is intentional, even strategic.

Explaining SC and MC Evaluations

RQ2 explores the extent to which SC and MC evaluations can be predicted by trustor, trustee, and message characteristics. To address this question, we started by compiling two models: one to predict SC and one to predict MC, using logistical regressions.

As can be seen in Table 2, both models are statistically significant (SC: p < .001; MC: p < .001). However, the r² and likelihood ratio (–2LL) indicate that the overall strength of both models is moderate at best, considering the number of predicting variables (SC: –2LL = 635.5, Nagelkerke’s r² = .104; MC: –2LL = 480.73, Nagelkerke’s r² =.162). Although only a few variables act as significant predictors within the models, removing any of them did not improve the prediction of the model.

Table 2.

Regressions Models Predicting SC, MC by Trustor, Trustee, and Message Characteristics.

	Source credibility^a			Message credibility^b
Predicting Factor	Wald	Exp. β	Sig.	Wald	Exp. Β	Sig.
Trustee (source)
Triggering/gathering source^c	1.1	1.27	NS	1.3	1.37	NS
Sector (Government/others)^d	0	1.03	NS	0.5	0.82	NS
Role (Public Relations/others)^d	18.2	0.38	**	9.6	0.43	**
Gender (male/others)^e	0.1	0.95	NS	2.6	1.5	NS
Regular/occasional source^f	0.1	1.08	NS	3.9	1.74	*
Trustor (reporter)
Relevant/irrelevant education^g	11.9	2.1	**	3.7	1.65	NS
Single/multi beat^h	2.8	0.69	NS	0.2	0.89	NS
Experienced/inexperiencedⁱ	3.5	1.56	NS	0	1.05	NS
Message (content)
Important vs. unimportant^j	3.2	1.51	NS	2	1.49	NS
Interesting vs. uninteresting^j	1.3	0.77	NS	2.4	0.64	NS
Conflicting vs. consonant^k	9.7	0.5	**	37.1	0.19	**
Planned vs. unplanned event^l	0.3	1.13	NS	0.2	1.14	NS
Exclusive vs. nonexclusive^m	0.3	1.15	NS	0.1	1.08	NS
Leaked vs. nonleaked basedⁿ	0.1	1.08	NS	0.3	0.82	NS

Note. SC = source credibility; MC = message credibility; NS = not significant.

SC logistic regression model summary: p < .001, –2LL = 635.5, Nagelkerke’s r² = .104, N = 1,030. ^bMC logistic regression model summary: p < .001, –2LL = 480.73, Nagelkerke’s r² = .162, N = 1,028. ^cTriggering source—the first source whose lead triggered the production of the news item. News gathering sources are all subsequent sources. ^dSector and role were recoded into dichotomous variables, juxtaposing the largest groups (governmental and PR) and all the rest. ^eIn a few cases, reporters didn’t know the gender of the source (mainly in cases of media teams, contacted via email or IM). Thus, to recode into dichotomous variables, we took the biggest group (Male) and compared it with both Female and Other. ^fRegular sources—contacted at least once a month. ^gRelevant education—an academic degree (completed or ongoing) in either communication, journalism school, or a field related to reporter’s news beat (e.g., financial reporter studying economics). ^hmulti-beat—covering at least two news beats. ⁱExperienced—15 years or more (the average years of experience in our sample). ^jLevel of item importance and interest—originally recorded on a 1–6 scale and recoded to dichotomous variables (1–3/4–6). ^kFactual conflict between sources’ versions. ^lPlanned events—press conference, press release, procedural processes, and so on; unplanned events—accidents, terror attacks, and so on. ^mExclusive—at least half of the information wasn’t published elsewhere. ⁿLeaked—unofficial and unauthorized disclosure of information from a source affiliated with a respective organization.

Bold values signifies

p < .05. **p < .001.

The strongest and most significant predictors of credibility are those that merge both message and source credibility. The first is the role of the source: PR sources and their message tend to be evaluated as significantly less credible than those that involve other types of sources (SC: Exp. β = .38, p < .001; MC: Exp. β = .43, p < .001). The second is the consonance of the message: when the messages from different sources conflict with each other, reporters tend to lower SC and MC evaluations (SC: Exp. β = .5, p < .001; MC: Exp. β = .19, p < .001). Two more variables are significant predictors of SC or MC: regular sources’ messages are likely to be evaluated as more credible than those of nonregular sources (Exp. β = 1.74, p = .048), and reporters with relevant education (a degree in communications, journalism, or academic studies related to their beat) tend to evaluate sources as significantly more credible (Exp. β = 2.1, p < .001).

What do these statistical findings teach us? Is it the sources’ role that impacts how reporters perceive the veracity of their messages or perhaps is it the positive assessment of a series of messages that leads reporters to choose specific types of sources, rendering them more credible than others? Is it conflicting messages that reduce credibility or reduced credibility that motivates reporters to contact additional sources, who, in turn, provide conflicting messages? The qualitative interviews are more insightful in answering these questions. Using the thematic analysis, we found four dominant themes that explain the logic behind credibility evaluations.

Official sources

The most common explanation why a source or a message was evaluated as credible was the officialness of the source, holding an organizational position and representing a governmental or public organization in charge of a specific issue. “If I want to get good macro [financial information] then the central bank’s spokesperson, or someone else inside, is who I go to,” explained a reporter. “This professor might provide me with a great analysis, but I cannot trust the data he gives me, I need to confirm this with the official source (i.e. the central bank).” “[E]ye witnesses are important,” explained another interviewee, “but the police eventually write up the report; they are the official source to tell me whose fault this was,” another one explained why he evaluated an eye witness account as poorly credible. Officialness was addressed as competence to provide quality and accurate information. “As the official authority on this, he has access to relevant information, access no one else has,” explained a reporter why a governmental spokesperson was the only credible source in a specific story.

Sources’ self-interest

Sources’ self-interest, or their lack of benevolence, was mentioned by the reporters to explain cases in which both sources and messages were rendered noncredible. Sources’ interest was often a pre-defined interest, perceived as biased because of “who they are, and their role,” as explained by one reporter. “I doubted her since I tend to assume PR people are less credible, politicians too; they have too much to gain from misleading me, so I always doubt instinctively whatever they say,” said one reporter. Ad hoc interest in a particular story was described by another reporter as follows:

I started working on this environmental story, and suddenly this PR person calls and tells me he has information. I know he represents two of the companies that are blamed for this event—he has a clear interest in this story, so I had to doubt him.

Does this mean that any source’s interest raises doubt? Of course not. Almost every news source has an axe to grind, and yet most sources are evaluated as credible (as seen above) and this explanation reappeared in many cases.

Conflicting messages

In many cases, lower MC evaluations were explained by their incongruence with a prior message from another source. “I could not believe what she said in this case simply because it contradicts what A. (another source) told me five minutes ago,” explained a reporter. While the quantitative findings confirm that there is less trust when messages conflict, reporters’ accounts demonstrate that this is mainly a result of doubt in one of the sources, not both. Interviewees firmly rejected our suggestion that they simply trusted the first person they spoke to. Instead, they often fell back on source-related reasoning to explain why they preferred a certain message over another: “I just trust him more because he is the official source in this case” and similar answers. Although conflict explains lower credibility evaluations in some cases, the decision which of the two conflicting sources’ version to prefer depends once again on the source characteristics, not the message.

Conflicting evaluations

Although they were not asked about the contradictory SC and MC evaluations, which amounted to about 100 instances, many of the reporters volunteered to explain these contradictions, in a way that sometimes sounded like post hoc self-justifications. While cases of high source credibility and low message credibility were explained as an incompetent official source (IOS), lower credibility sources that managed to supply high credibility messages were explained as sensible information from a dubious origin (SIDO). The first type (IOS) was perceived as having good intentions, yet they lacked the required expertise to speak about the specific issue at hand. Hence, this source was evaluated as credible, due to her benevolence, position, and former performance, but her message was evaluated as noncredible, due to the incompetence to speak about the specific issue. As one interviewee demonstrated,

I am talking to A [a military general] for example, and someone in his position will never lie to me, but we are talking about the military budget, and he is not exactly a financial expert. So, I evaluate him as credible due to is honesty, but I can’t rely on what he told me.

In the second conflicting combination, SIDO, the source was infamously known as dishonest (justifiably or not) while the message was presumed credible, either being too insignificant to involve an effort to lie or since the information cohered with existing knowledge. As summarized by one interviewee, “L. (a known spokesperson) lies a lot,” he said,

but if he sends me an email about something trivial, like the new summer menu of a restaurant he represents, or tells me something I already know is true from another source, or even if the information is new to me, but he can back it up with a recording, then I will say he is noncredible, but his message is [credible].

To answer RQ2, we can say that the overarching logic of credibility evaluations that emerges from the combination of the qualitative and quantitative analysis indicates that trustees’ characteristics explain reporters’ trust allocation most of the time.

Implications of SC and MC

In this final part of the findings, we wish to understand how SC and MC affect the reporting process and reporters’ knowledge about the state of affairs behind their stories (addressed by RQ3). We will address the question by relying on reporters’ accounts in the qualitative interviews, which, unlike the quantitative data, are nuanced enough to discuss matters of knowledge. First, this is done by seeking general statements made by reporters regarding the effect of trust and then by systematically exploring whether trust was mentioned as a consideration for designing the news process and as a justification for reporters’ beliefs that a certain version is true (or false)—as an indication of knowledge.

In our interviewees’ general statements regarding the effect of SC and MC, we found two contradictory attitudes toward the effect of noncredible sources on their work and knowledge. On one hand, most reporters claim that items involving noncredible sources and messages tend to end up with shakier epistemic foundations. This means that in such cases, they work harder, verify the information, and contact more sources, and yet the final items often contain less knowledge about the reported issues—as they remain less certain of its veracity nonetheless. “No matter how much effort I put in, I still remain less confident,” summarized one reporter. On the other hand, a minority of the interviewees dismissed lower credibility as mere nuisance that hardly affects their work or knowledge. “I usually have enough to go with. If one source or another is problematic, it is nothing more than an irritation,” explained one reporter. For them, deciding how to act or how certain they can be based on sources’ credibility is a none-professional behavior. “I need to be critical no matter what, if I only check when I feel something is wrong, and verify only in these cases, it means that the rest of the time I am failing to do my job,” explained another reporter.

Interviewees’ direct references to the effect of trust on their knowledge should be treated critically. They seem to represent a professional ideology more than actual behavior and thoughts. In the indirect questioning, in which reporters justified knowledge, once again the most important factor was sources’ credibility and their officialness. As can be seen in Table 3, which summarizes the qualitative analysis, in 88% of the cases, knowledge was explained by SC, and only 18% by MC. SC was also mentioned in more than half the items as a consideration for deciding which epistemic practices to use during the news gathering stage, and MC in 18%.

Table 3.

The Contribution of Source and Message Credibility to Knowledge in the Qualitative Analysis (N = 50).

Factor	Specific contribution	Justification for adoption/rejection of belief (knowledge)^a	Considerations for news gathering decisions^a
Source credibility contributions^b	Officialdom	34	16
	Prior acquaintance	7	14
	Source agenda	7	5
	Unspecified/other	9	0
	Total^c	44/50	27/50
Message credibility contributions^b	Improbable fabrication	3	0
	Supporting evidence	3	3
	Reasonable	6	9
	Unspecified/other	2	0
	Total^c	9/50	10/50
None	Source/message credibility wasn’t mentioned	6/50	20/50

Based on explicit justifications/considerations mentioned by the reporter. ^bEither credibility or lack thereof. ^cCategories are not mutually exclusive; hence, they do not add up to the entire sample (N = 50).

Bold values signifies *p < .05. **p < .001.

Although these findings are based on qualitative analysis and far from being representative, they show the overwhelming influence of source officialness on reporters’ knowledge. In more than two-thirds of the cases, source officialness was the criterion mentioned to justify knowledge: “How do I know this is what really happened? Because I got the information from A. [a senior governmental administrator] and he has the final say on this, he is the official source.” Similar answers were given by other reporters in no less than 33 items. “[A]s soon as I got this information from an official source, I didn’t have much work to do, because I can rely on him,” explained another reporter, as did his counterparts in another 15 similar cases. Other source factors that were used to justify knowledge were prior acquaintance with the source and the source’s agenda.

Message credibility was mentioned less often: the fact that a message made sense was mentioned in 12% of the cases to justify a belief and in 18% to justify a reporting procedure. “It makes sense, what she [the source] said, so I know it is true and I do not need to start an extensive verification process now,” explained one reporter. Other message-related accounts indicated how unlikely it was that someone would bother to make-up such a story, or that it was supported by other evidence.

Altogether, the direct and indirect questions reveal that both SC and MC have a substantial effect on reporters’ beliefs and decisions whether to employ epistemic practices; however, SC and source officialness have a more dominant impact.

Discussion

This article is based on a comprehensive effort to explore the complex role of trust in current information environments, using the case study of journalism. The research design involves three innovations. First, it combines qualitative and quantitative methods to cover different facets of trust. Second, it differentiates conceptually and methodologically between source and message credibility. Third, it pays attention not only to the functionality of trust but also to its dysfunctions.

Our findings show for the first time that despite the high correlation between source and message credibility (r = .65), news reporters can distinguish between them. However, this distinction is more conceptual than practical. In practice, journalists rely most of the time on source credibility as a reporting strategy. This strategy enables them to minimize reporting and epistemic energies as well as to hedge the risk of erroneous publication by reliance on official sources. However, we also found that in a mélange of circumstances, the shortcut strategy is replaced by a more exhaustive one: when journalists identify an epistemically challenging news story, when sources present factually conflicting versions; when infamously noncredible sources deliver messages that are evaluated as too trivial to involve misinformation or information that coheres with existing knowledge; and when official sources deliver messages that fall outside their jurisdiction. In these cases, a mix of source credibility and message credibility evaluations is employed, alongside other practices such as verification.

The theoretical significance of these findings can impact both journalism theory and broader theories of trust. In the realm of journalism studies, our findings invite reconsideration of the “typification” paradigm (Tuchman, 1978, p. 58), according to which reporters first diagnose the content and then tailor a suitable news treatment, based on a quasi-economical decision-making logic (Cook, 1998; McManus, 1994; Tuchman, 1978). Instead, reporters rely most of the time (over two-thirds of the cases)—by default, as an “autopilot” mode—on the credibility of their sources. Only in less than one-third of the cases do they shift gears to “manual mode,” delving into message credibility and other evaluation methods (including verification). The proportion between both modes is much more contrasted than the typification paradigm suggests, resembling a Pareto distribution.

Does the Pareto distribution of default reliance on source credibility apply to broader society? Previous studies suggest that source credibility dominates lay peoples’ and even experts’ judgment (Rieh & Belkin, 1998); however, the frequency of their reliance on source evaluations remains unclear. In professional and private life, people tend to trust friends, colleagues, neighbors, and service providers—unless they have defeaters “counterbeliefs or counterevidence” (Lackey & Sosa, 2006, p. 166) that indicate they should not trust. What do ordinary citizens do when spouses, neighbors, or close friends convey assertions that sound weird or unreliable? They too can switch to skeptic mode; however, our intuition suggests that unlike journalists, they won’t rush to check the message’s veracity—unless the message bears serious and immediate implications for them, as “pragmatic encroachment” theory suggests (Ross & Schroeder, 2014). Unlike journalists who verify half of their items (Barnoy & Reich, 2019), ordinary citizens have neither the motivation to act immediately nor the knowledge how to verify and with whom, and not even the license to interrogate their immediate surroundings and pose adversarial questions.

If further studies find that lay people, too, tend to rely on source credibility in a similar manner, we will have to rethink the prevailing models on the mechanisms of trust allocation in society. Trust, according to this analysis, is allocated neither solely based on accumulating series of encounters with people, as the inductive model suggests (Hume, 1748/1999), nor always based on integrative evaluations of the content, interaction, and sources, as the mix inference model suggested (Koenig & Harris, 2007). Instead, it is inductive by default, transferring to mix inferences in cases where the source evaluation is insufficient.

In addition, journalists are not immune to trust prejudices, in tandem with socio-cognitive theories of trust (Castelfranchi & Falcone, 2005). Since people often do not possess the epistemically relevant information to evaluate a source’s credibility (e.g., how she got the information, what her intentions are), they often turn to “arbitrary” criteria, such as homophily, or even race and gender (Alcoff, 2001). In this study, we did not find any significant associations between source gender and credibility. However, as both hegemony critics and scholars of “epistemic injustice” maintain (Fricker, 2007; Gitlin, 1980; Hall et al., 1978), the automatic preference of fixed and official sources unjustly excludes and marginalizes nonelite, alternative voices from public discourse. Since they lack the traits that traditionally encourage trust (Alcoff, 2001), their messages are systematically doubted and dismissed by default.

Are the epistemic standards found here safe enough for the production of news that people count on in private and public matters? Ideally, in their roles as chief disseminators of knowledge about public affairs, as “public trustees” (Graves, 2016, p. 523), journalists would have been expected to use skepticism rather than trust as a default and verify every piece of information. These expectations are especially valid in the post-truth era, when sources seem less committed to truth-telling (Graves, 2016; Pickard, 2017).

However, journalists fall short of these expectations, first, since they are not in the business of idealism. News reporters are expected to yield “relatively accurate” information (Nielsen, 2017, p. 9), under numerous constraints of time, resources, and uncertainty. Second, at least some of the shortcuts of reliance on source credibility were adopted to mitigate the growing pressures to “do more with less” (Lund, 2012, p. 203) and accelerate their work pace. Finding strategies to reduce cognitive effort and enable prompt publications, without severely damaging the quality of their work, is not only permissible but also desirable. Third, news reporters are not born journalists. They grow up in societies where reliance on others is a natural human tendency, internalizing the socio-cognitive codes and mechanisms of source credibility. In these societies, even skeptical scientists rely mostly on their colleagues’ publications without replicating their research (Hardwig, 1991).

Finally, reliance on source credibility might actually be a healthy epistemic strategy under certain circumstances, especially in growingly deceptive environments, when issues are more science-laden and not always commonsensical, and when reporters are less equipped epistemically. For example, when searching for medical online advice in the information jungle of the World Wide Web, reliance on credible sources represents the golden epistemic standard, as it reduces the risk of adopting false belief (Eastin, 2001; J. McKnight & Coronel, 2017). This strategy might help restore some of the trust—albeit not blindly—in public agencies and the courts that are challenged worrisomely in post-truth and populist societies (Botsman, 2017).

These findings reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the news beat system that is widely used by news organizations as a major principle for division of labor. Being assigned to a particular domain encourages journalists to develop an elaborate network of regular sources to rely on. Unlike general assignment reporters, the repetitive encounters with the same sources allow more epistemic justification for trust, at least when journalists have no time for further verification and when the sources involved have a suitable credibility record. On one hand, this dynamic increases reporters’ dependence on elite, official, and male sources (Manning, 2001; Tuchman, 1978). Nonbeat reporters will still have to allocate trust in order to get the news ready on time; however, they have much weaker justifications for trust-based decisions, due to their ever-changing landscape of sources.

The current study relied on self-testimonies of reporters. Despite taking several methodological measures, we must remember that reporters’ reflections are prone to social desirability bias and hindsight bias. The cognitive process of trusting others and their messages remains somewhat elusive, even for professional allocators of trust. Finally, our focus on single stories overlooks long-term process in which sources are earning and losing credibility ratings.

Since trust in others is a universal human phenomenon, we shouldn’t assume the Israeli case study is largely exceptional. Attitudes to trust were found to be similar among journalists in other western countries (Zmerli & Newton, 2008). And yet, as a relatively small country of 8 million people, Israeli society is characterized by limited political distance and high social connectedness. In a society where everyone knows someone who knows someone, exploring the background of old and new sources seems somewhat easier. On other hand, Israeli society is highly polarized along religious, political, social, and economic lines, increasing the likelihood of trust-based exclusion of alternative and minority voices (Avraham, 2003).

Future studies should examine more closely the cognitive aspects of credibility evaluations using psychological methods. They should try and explore how long-term relationships affect trust, studying the sources’ side as well. Studies should focus on non-news reporters, such as citizen journalists, feature writers, and investigative reporters, who are less tied to a regular ensemble of news sources. Other studies might explore the relationship between reporters and noncredible sources, whose stories often end up in reporters’ trash bins.

Supplemental Material

Appendix – Supplemental material for Trusting Others: A Pareto Distribution of Source and Message Credibility Among News Reporters

Supplemental material, Appendix for Trusting Others: A Pareto Distribution of Source and Message Credibility Among News Reporters by Aviv Barnoy and Zvi Reich in Communication Research

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Aviv Barnoy

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Aviv Barnoy, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department for Community Information Systems at Zefat academic college and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa. Barnoy is currently conducting an interdisciplinary, mix method empirical project, examining the epistemic norms governing citizens’ decision to share false or misleading information on social networks. His research interests include the epistemology of fake news and journalism, social media and Public Relations.

Zvi Reich, PhD, is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, a former journalist and a member of the Israel Press Council. He is interested in journalistic practices and the epistemic aspects of journalism. His work was published in New Media and Society, Communication Theory, Journalism and Journalism Studies.

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