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The Watchdog Press in the Doghouse: A Comparative Study of Attitudes about Accountability Journalism, Trust in News, and News Avoidance

Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 29, issue 2 (2024), pp. 485-506

"The watchdog role has been one of the most widely discussed normative functions of the press. In this study, we examine the public’s attitudes toward the news media’s watchdog performance and how they correlate with trust in news and news avoidance, two important phenomena for democracy and the ... more

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“Fair and Balanced”: What News Audiences in Four Countries Mean When They Say They Prefer Impartial News

Camila Mont 'Alverne, Sumitra Badrinathan, Amy Ross Arguedas, Benjamin Toffet al.

Journalism Studies, volume 24, issue 9 (2023), pp. 1131-1148

"Impartial news, or news without a partisan slant or overt point-ofview, is overwhelmingly preferred by news audiences worldwide, yet what such preferences mean remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine what people mean when they say they prefer impartial news. We draw on qualitative inte ... more

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Strategies for Building Trust in News: What the Public Say They Want Across Four Countries

Sayan Banerjee, Amy Ross Arguedas, Benjamin Toff et al.

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2023), 76 pp.

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Snap Judgements: How Audiences Who Lack Trust in News Navigate Information on Digital Platforms

Amy Ross Arguedas, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont'Alverne, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2022), 43 pp.

"In this report, we qualitatively examine how audiences who lack trust in most news organisations in their countries navigate the digital information environment, especially how they make sense of the news they encounter while using social media, messaging applications, or search engines. Drawing on ... a sample of 100 individuals in four countries – Brazil, India, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US) – we centre on how they use Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, based on a unique interviewing approach anchored in their concrete everyday experiences. Participants were asked to describe and respond to what they actually saw on their screens as they navigated these platforms in real time while speaking to members of our research team. This research is focused on individuals with minimal trust in most news sources and below-average interest in politics – a population often neglected in audience research since these individuals tend to be least likely to consume news. However, for that same reason, understanding the way they encounter and engage with information online is of particular importance. Indeed, in line with prior survey-based research (Toff et al. 2021c), we found these individuals tended to be indifferent towards, or even opposed to, the idea of receiving news through platforms, which they said they primarily used for other purposes. What we found is that when they did encounter news on platforms and sought to assess how credible the information might be, they often relied on cues for making quick, in-the-moment judgements, which were particularly important since many of these users rarely clicked through to the original sources of news. The mental shortcuts people discussed, summarised in Figure 1, involved (1) pre-existing ideas they held about news in general or specific news brands (where the information was coming from), but also several other factors: (2) social cues from family and friends (who shared or engaged with the news), (3) the tone and wording of headlines (whether or not it was perceived as clickbait), (4) the use of visuals (which they often saw as important evidence for what could or could not be trusted), and (5) the presence of advertising (whether or not information appeared to be sponsored). Additional (6) platform-specific cues also played a role in shaping judgements about what to trust. These involved design decisions around how information appears on platforms (e.g. what labels appear, what is given most prominence), which in turn affect many of these other cues." (Introduction and key findings, page 3) more

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Listening to What Trust in News Means to Users: Qualitative Evidence from Four Countries

Benjamin Toff, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2021), 50 pp.

"This report examines how people in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US view news media in their countries, the factors they use when determining whether sources are trustworthy, and what ‘trust in news’ ultimately means to them [...] While we note throughout the report areas of difference between ... more

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Overcoming Indifference: What Attitudes Towards News Tell Us About Building Trust

Benjamin Toff, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2021), 69 pp.

"This report contains a range of findings about news audiences in each of the four countries [Brazil, India, United Kingdom, United States], focusing on audiences overall as well as different segments of the public categorised according to their degree of trust towards news brands in their country. ... more

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What We Think We Know and What We Want to Know: Perspectives on Trust in News in a Changing World

Benjamin Toff, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nelsen

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2020), 26 pp.

"Trust in news has eroded worldwide. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, fewer than four in ten people (38%) across 40 markets say they typically trust most news. While trust has fallen by double digit margins in recent years in many places, including Brazil and the Unit ... ed Kingdom, in other countries more stable overall trends conceal stark and growing partisan divides. Why is trust eroding, how does it play out across different contexts and different groups, what are the implications, and what might be done about it? These are the organising questions behind the Trust in News Project. This report is the first of many we will publish from the project over the next three years. Because trust is a relationship between trustors and trustees, we anticipate focusing primarily on audiences and the way they think about trust, but we begin the project by taking stock of how those who study journalism and those who practice it think about the subject [...] We focus on media environments in four democracies – Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries encompass both the Global South and North, with a range of cultural heterogeneity and political practices that vary in their partisan and populist tendencies. For our purposes, one of the most important differences across these countries is in how audiences have integrated digital and social media practices into how they consume news. Whereas public social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have rapidly become key conduits of information in democracies worldwide, many of those we interviewed pointed to the popularity of encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, specifically in Brazil and India, which have combined with deficits in digital literacy to serve as a ‘breeding ground’ for misinformation and disinformation (Chakrabarti et al. 2018). As Irineu Machado, head of content delivery at UOL (Brazil), told us, audiences increasingly ‘distrust organisations who traditionally’ cover news and ‘distrust information in general’, and some rely not just on public social networking sites but also private groups and messaging applications [...] This report is divided into two main sections. First, we outline important lessons from existing research and practitioners’ observations on trust in news. Second, we identify outstanding questions that we expect will guide our project in the years ahead." (Introduction) more