Restoring trust in media: it can be done

But what about the gangs?

The decline in people’s trust in the media, as according to surveys, has been linked with an apparent trend in journalism towards a blurring of the boundaries between reporting facts, providing contextual analysis and politically one-sided advocacy. According to some, journalists are out to change the world, not just to report on it. Some say that’s a good thing, when they like the direction of change, but others disagree. This was addressed in North & South by Jeremy Rose, with a particular focus on TVNZ’s John Campbell – a prominent journalist who’s taken some “opinionated” positions. Especially for state-owned media (TVNZ and RNZ), there’s a counter-argument that they should aim for politically impartial and balanced reporting. That implies leaving the more partisan or activist stuff to whomever out there “in the wild” wants to build audiences by being opinionated. After all, there’s a market for biased discourse on both the left and the right, and new media have created opportunities for new voices at both ends. To add to these concerns about partisanship in the media, political discourse is becoming more toxic and harming social cohesion, as discussed by Bryce Edwards recently.

Many people reasonably accuse the media of focusing too much attention on (often minor) political scandals and of sensationalism (“if it bleeds it leads”). And then there’s the Trumpian blanket accusation of “fake news”.

Is it possible to achieve some kind of balance here?

One answer may simply be that “balance” isn’t really possible. Political issues and events are, by their nature, ambivalent and fast-moving. The field itself is always off-balance, and the current media environment is rapidly changing and diversifying, if not disintegrating. AI will only accelerate this, so welcome to the new info-war, or “informational anarchism”. Caveat emptor: bring your own bullshit-detector.

Nevertheless, I’m hanging on to the idea that trust in the media can be restored – but I don’t mean “blind” or unconditional trust. It would be a conditional trust based on critical thinking among journalists and audiences. Distrust, in the sense of intelligent scepticism, is a good way to approach reading anything – other than fantasy fiction. When people decry the decline of trust in media (or in politicians), they never explain what the value of “more trust” would be, beyond simply proclaiming how trust is vital for democracy. But dictators want to be trusted too, so it’s not a convincing pitch. If “less trust” is considered a bad thing, then “more trust” is supposedly good. But how much trust? Joseph Stalin expected everyone to trust him – or else.

People get carried away with survey questions that ask random individuals about how much they trust things out there. This doesn’t take account of the relational and conditional nature of people’s trust in complex institutions.

I’ve spoken with many reporters over the years, and, in my experience, they’re trustworthy people. Interpersonal communication helps to build trust, but not everyone gets to have that kind of experience with the media. Here’s a hypothesis to get us started: trust in the media, as a social institution, is conditional on our assessment of the degree to which they faithfully convey facts, reflect what’s going on in communities in ways that people recognise, and give differing opinions a fair hearing.

As others have argued before, however, “objectivity” and “impartiality” are high ideals, but they’ve been used (or misused) to disguise or legitimate orthodoxies, elite viewpoints and sometimes sheer nonsense. We needn’t be nostalgic about pre-internet news on TV, radio and paper. There were always editorial controls: someone decides what counts and leads as news, how headlines are framed, and what or who gets left out. These may have been based on taken-for-granted assumptions rather than conspiracies, but they embedded certain political values. What’s in and what’s out, who’s heard and who’s not heard, and the tone in which things get discussed, all reflected an underlying political worldview. Was negative news, for instance, about an organisation ever suppressed for fear of losing it as an advertiser? And would we ever know? Old assumptions about “objectivity”, if they still exist, are being dismantled, along with the newsrooms themselves, precipitated by a decline in advertising revenues. (As I write, the news is about losses of jobs and key programmes at TVNZ.)

We needn’t fear diversity of political opinion or challenges to orthodox ideas, but neither should we accept an “anything goes” approach in which reporters unapologetically throw aside their flimsy masks of professional impartiality and put their own personal political viewpoints to the fore. Outside of the authoritarian regimes, there’ll always be a contest between opposing partisan commentators on specialised channels and on social media – people who won’t leave you guessing as to where they stand politically, and who won’t always obey rules about, for instance, attacking the issue rather than the person. But, on the whole, journalists (and academics) still have an obligation to at least search for balance in an off-balance world, in ways that respect and convey differing political values and ideas.

One approach is to set aside simplified uses of the adjectives “objective” and “subjective”. They’re often used as if they were understood by all and represented opposing ends of a spectrum.

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As we grew from childhood, we each brought with us a set of expectations and ideas about how the world works – and how it should work – acquired from the people we looked up to and implicitly trusted, such as parents, teachers, community leaders and so on. Some people get exposed to views that challenge those initial values and perhaps they rebel against their elders. In any case, each person becomes accustomed to a particular “rabbit hole”: a colourful array of political values, expectations and assumptions, often unspoken, that helps makes sense of the world we inhabit. We just don’t see, or don’t like to admit, that we’re in a “rabbit hole”. When news content looks and sounds like what we’re used to, then we register that as “normal”, and not as “biased”. It may be slanted, but it slants in the direction we’re used to.

Sooner rather than later, however, a disturbing reality intrudes on each of us: not everyone shares our assumed and cherished values. Indeed, some people may openly despise the things we stand for. Anger arises, and, at worst, violence follows. This is nothing new. History books are full of such stories, so social media and “the algorithms” aren’t entirely to blame.

The societies that managed this problem the best – that is, with the least antagonism or violence – are not those that tried to get everyone to agree on the same values, but rather those that exercised toleration. This doesn’t mean putting up with just anything. Toleration has to know its own limits. It means being (paradoxically) intolerant of ideas and actions that seriously threaten people’s peaceful enjoyment of life in a diverse community – which means making a political judgement about where the limits lie, as there’s no science to help us here.

If you’re with me this far, then the next question is how to achieve a working social equilibrium that we could call “tolerant yet cohesive” – in a rapidly changing world. How is to be governed? Here I’m meaning “govern” in the broader sense: not just top-down, but also our government of ourselves and of the groups we belong to. Government relies on norms and customs that are also subject to change, even though certain basic problems may endure.

None of this calls for unconditional trust from the public. A diverse and tolerant community needs open and (self-)critical minds, especially if it values democracy. The education of those minds means exposure to unfamiliar, differing and sometimes discomfiting facts and ideas. A critically minded media audience that has ready access to competing viewpoints will be neither satisfied with, nor fooled by, politically one-eyed reporters – or academics. There’ll undoubtedly be a place for activist journalists and academics (indeed, it’d be inconsistent to try to suppress them), but they’ll appeal more to minority audiences or niche markets. Media and universities that want to occupy larger segments of their markets will be those that are prepared to assimilate ideas that their own employees may sometimes not like, rather than to silence them or rule them out of order. Canceling Don Brash, for instance, means you’re going after a niche market only. Nationally relevant institutions actively seek out and endeavour to understand differing political points of view. They challenge, and are challenged by, those differences.

This political trust (between media and audiences, and between competing social groups) requires establishing a basis of reliable facts, accepting that facts are often contestable, looking for the principles and resources that are at stake, and then seeking to understand the political differences or disagreements, rather than trying to overcome them. It means allowing audiences to make up their own minds, based on the facts and on the differing opinions. Media can regain people’s trust by trusting them – or treating people as intelligent conscientious beings.

More highly educated people tend to have greater trust in what they see and hear in the media than those with only compulsory schooling. You might have thought it was the other way around, as educated critical minds are more sceptical. On the other hand, those who are trained in critical thinking are better able to discern between what’s plausible and what’s nonsense or fake. This skill helps people to be wary of sources that really are misleading or dishonest, and to identify those in whom we can have some confidence.

Trust is a two-way street: it’s more than just an opinion held by individuals; it’s relational, and based on mutual obligations. If an organisation or profession wants to be trusted, then it’ll state clearly what it’s able to promise for people (its value-proposition) and set about delivering the goods. Consumers in return will use their critical faculties, because no story is ever the full story. The parties will talk with one another more often, to break down mutual suspicion and to build trust. Seeing people “like me” or from my locality in the news will help.

Here’s a good essay on the topic by an American academic. In the US, there’s a strongly partisan skew in the surveyed levels of trust in news media. Republicans, especially those who strongly support Trump, are less trusting, according to Pew Research surveys done while Trump was in office. That’s no surprise, as Trump openly amplified distrust. And that partisan division seemed to just get worse over time. Pew also found that “black Americans often exhibit greater support of news organizations and journalists than Hispanic or white Americans” – which you might not have expected.

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On Thursday, the NZ government introduced a bill banning members of specified gangs from wearing patches (or any gang insignia) in public, and providing for dispersal and non-consorting orders on gang members – with potential prison sentences for breaches. It was a manifesto policy of the new government, and was on their 100-day plan.

The bill defines “gang” by simply listing them. It identifies 41 gangs by name.

The Girl Guides aren’t on that list, so they’ll be safe to gather and wear their insignia in public. And some witty folk are saying that the National Party should be on the list.

But will the 41 identified gangs now rebrand and adopt new names? The schedule can be changed by order-in-council on the recommendation of the Minister of Police, so it’s not hard to add new gang names. The list might get a lot longer.

If the KKK were to make an unwelcome appearance in New Zealand, their name could be added only if they “promote, encourage, or engage in criminal activity”. Just walking around in white garb wouldn’t make them liable for a dispersal order, in my non-expert opinion, even though their mere presence projects hate and instills fear.

The morning before the bill was introduced, an article by Guyon Espiner on the RNZ website said: “The government’s gang crackdown could backfire, driving up rates of gang membership, increasing domestic violence and making it harder to exit gangs, according to expert advice from justice officials.”

Furthermore, the bill is officially deemed inconsistent with some of the NZ Bill of Rights Act’s freedoms – which will cause debate at the select committee.

The proposed law may be ineffective and even unconstitutional. But the minister responsible, Paul Goldsmith, said, “the officials didn’t really like the policy, but of course, they weren’t elected, we were elected”. So take that. Parliaments can pass laws even if they’re inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act, and Labour voted for the Gangs Legislation Amendment Bill at the first reading to usher it on at least to select committee.

If the democratic process favours laws that aren’t supported by “the experts”, then do we conclude there’s something wrong with expert opinion or something wrong with public opinion – or even something wrong with elections? If people vote for things that experts say aren’t supported by scientific evidence, then what are the options? Here are some options that won’t work: Make people attend lectures by experts. Use the media to drum the science in. Introduce unpopular policy by stealth and ignore or manipulate public opinion (a suggestion that was put to me seriously once). Dispense with elections and appoint a technocratic government.

In rational debate, evidence trumps opinion – but politics doesn’t always happen that way. When, in 2017, I asked many thousands of people online what they most wanted to change in New Zealand, an answer that sometimes came up spontaneously was “get rid of the gangs”. People feel intimidated by them, and they don’t like them congregating, flaunting their branded gear and attracting recruits. They want the police to do something about it. That was one reason why voters changed the government in 2023.

In a democratic society in which the media are trusted, they help people to make up their own minds on such issues, based on what’s known and on a range of differing opinions. People actively interpret information, however. Minds don’t work like sponges, and people may not draw the conclusions that authorities intended them to draw. One may ask, “Aren’t certain kinds of opinions undeserving of consideration?” Yes, some kinds of political opinion, such as fascism, get examined at arm’s length, with due caution and disapproval. Toleration does come with limits. But citing the extremes, as exceptions, doesn’t invalidate the general principles of toleration and diversity for a cohesive society.

Consciously opinionated reporting, social activism and political partisanship are best avoided in media that aim for nationwide audiences. Freedom of speech and of the press are vital, however, and so the principle can’t be enforced. But if media organisations want to restore trust and to be taken seriously, then the avoidance of partisanship and an honest effort to be balanced are necessary. Choosing to be biased may work if you really only want a smaller audience. A similar principle applies to universities.

This image was AI-generated on Gencraft.