Journalism faces a crisis in trust. Journalists fall into two very different camps for how to fix it

Journalism faces a well-documented crisis of trust. This long-running decline in public confidence in the press is part of a broader skepticism that has developed about the trustworthiness of institutions more generally — leading to an overall trust recession that worries observers who speculate about the endgame of this downward spiral.

But might we see these issues of news and trust in a new light if we reconsidered our assumptions about what actually leads people to develop trust in journalism?

Consider, for example, how journalists for decades have sought to establish trust and confidence by focusing on their democratic responsibility to provide objective information — in which case, trust is presumed to be a product of faithfully adhering to standards and neutrality. In that case, reclaiming trust could be a matter of “getting back to basics,” as it were, and reporting facts in a way that more clearly communicates what people need to know, with the independence and distance that people have come to expect from journalists.