(Dis)Trust

Freedom of the press and democracy are inseparable, or so we are told. Yet frequently this relationship is assumed without any critical evaluation of what freedom related to the media really means or what democracy actually is. Rather it is taken as a given, a form of common sense, a hegemonic trope for contemporary times. This trope has become embedded in a complex normative vernacular that has become the protective armour of many journalists who, when the right button is pressed, will breathlessly declare how journalism is an independent watchdog, a monitor of unchecked power, a tribune of the people, a defender of the weakest, a fourth estate, a public sphere. Freedom of the press is declared as the very musculoskeletal system that provides the form, support, strength and movement for the beating heart of democracy. Such discourse is so commonplace and so consistently drawn upon that it belies critical evaluation of actually existing journalism.

Yet, if we suspend for a moment the power of such celebratory hubris and look a little deeper, what we often find is precisely the opposite: forms of journalism that prey on the vulnerable and are frequently discriminatory (Moore and Ramsay, 2017); a journalism, the noble crusade of which for truth and justice has been too often replaced by a carnival of gossip and spectacle (Bird, 2009); forms of journalism wholly committed to market practices driven by the desire to ensure profit rather than the difficult practices involved in free expression, political participation and democratic renewal (Coleman, 2012).

It should come as no surprise then that we are currently seeing a decline in journalism’s authority and legitimacy. This decline of trust in journalism is one of the biggest challenges facing journalism today.

The Edelman Trust Barometer surveys over 33,000 people in 28 countries across the globe. In 2018, when asked to indicate which institution they trusted to do what is right, ‘the media in general’ came out as the least trusted institution in 22 of the 28 countries. In the United Kingdom taking all of the many surveys on trust together, Cathcart (2017) has shown how the general trend is that trust in national newspaper journalism in the United Kingdom is low in comparison to other media, to other countries and to other institutions. In 2017, the (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2017) said that trust in the media in the United Kingdom had plummeted to an all-time low of 32 per cent (the same as in the United States) and it stayed the same in 2018 when only 23 per cent of UK youth said they trusted the media. In 2018, in the wake of ‘fake news’, the UK media was quick to point out that trust in traditional media had risen. Journalism was more trusted than social media platforms. But a closer look at these data shows that while the likes of the BBC are indeed more trusted, the red-top journalism of the UK tabloid press still languishes at the bottom. What is more, 63 per cent of people globally said that the average person does not know how to tell rumour from falsehoods. The same survey also revealed that 33 per cent of people are reading or listening to the news less and 19 per cent are avoiding the news altogether because it is too depressing (40%), too one-side or biased (33%) or controlled by hidden agendas (27%). And 66 per cent of people said that news organizations were more concerned with attracting a big audience than reporting (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2018).

Independent journalism of integrity does not sit well with commercial practice when profits are falling. George Osborne, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer for the David Cameron government and now editor of the London Evening Standard (in a sideways move indicative of the close relationship between the two institutions), has recently been accused of striking a deal with six major advertisers in the paper to secure ‘money can’t buy’ positive news and ‘favourable’ comment pieces, causing cries of corruption and ethical malpractice (Cusick, 2018).

Concentration of media ownership also brings concentration of power. The United Kingdom has a supposedly competitive national newspaper market, but just four companies, presided over by tax exiles and media moguls, control 90 per cent of daily circulation and help set the agenda for the rest of the news media (Media Reform Coalition, 2015). Legacy press may have lost the trust of the nation but they have not lost the ability to influence the public conversation and conduct of the rest of the media. Research on the agenda setting influence of right-wing newspapers on broadcast news coverage of the 2015 General Election in the United Kingdom (Moore and Ramsay, 2016) and the coverage of the European Union Referendum points to the continuing ability of those voices to distort conversations about contemporary politics (Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, 2016).

Meanwhile, convergent shifts in cultural production, journalism, political communication, marketing and data mining have contributed to the emergence of a mediated regime facilitated by deregulated, commodified, affective and ever-faster forms of ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean, 2005). Here, political discourse is commandeered by the stuff of entertainment, while news all too often traffics in trivialities and repackaged public relations material and occupies an increasingly fragile and narrow centre ground. This determination, traceable across the last 40 years, to subjugate all areas of mediated activity to market logic and competition through ever-more commercialization, privatization and restructuring has prepared the way for what Will Davies has referred to as ‘post-truth politics’ based on an over-supply of ‘facts’ and an under-provision of meaningful analysis (Davies, 2016).

This is complicated yet further with the likes of Google and Facebook. Ofcom show high levels of news consumption through third-party platforms. But before we conveniently point the finger at the new global giants on the block we should be aware that the 2017 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute (2017) also states that ‘the vast majority of news people consume still comes from mainstream media and that most of the reasons for distrust also relate to mainstream media’ (p. 19).

Rebuilding trust requires transparency and accountability with visible fairness (Schlosberg, 2013). Practices that have brought the profession into disrepute need to be defined as professionally and socially unacceptable and the press needs to recognize the need for independent regulation so that its practices can be open to challenge and subject to scrutiny. Independence means independence from government control but also independence from commercial interests. It also means identifying principles of good journalistic practice – principles that are themselves subject to regular external review. The majority of the UK mainstream press is currently self-regulated by Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). According to IPSO’s own data, it received 8148 complaints in a single year relating to discrimination but only one of those was upheld. This is due to the nature of Clause 12 of the Editors Code that only allows complaints of discrimination to be upheld when they are made against individuals and not a group of people such as Muslims, LGBTQ+, migrants, refugees, women and so on. In other words, it ‘gives license to general discrimination by explicitly excluding it from its definition’ (Moore and Ramsay, 2017). The Editors’ Code Committee (chaired by the editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre – the newspaper which has consistently been found to have committed the most breaches of the Code) revised the Code in 2015 and knew precisely what it was doing. And so, it is perfectly happy to consider 8148 complaints relating to discrimination and say that there is not a problem.

Until journalists are willing to recognize that freedom of the press must be balanced by freedom of the public to assess and challenge the nature of that communication: freedom shared not power abused, trust in journalism is unlikely to be rebuilt. Until journalism is able to hold its own institutions of power to account, expose its own malpractices and is willing to challenge some of the most obvious abuses of media power, distrust in news journalism is likely to grow. Where concentration of media ownership makes politicians too willing to garner favour with news organizations, we must legislate for more and better media plurality and oppose further media concentration. The decentralized affordances of digital media ought to make this easier to achieve – but only if they are freed from the same structures of controlling state and profit-maximizing market that have distorted and undermined previous communication ‘revolutions’.