News is everything and nothing at the same time
The team at the Reuters Institute recently published their latest research into “trust in news”. It’s a fascinating read, based on a series of focus groups held in Brazil, India, the UK and the US.
One of the biggest things that stood out was how much participants equated news with entertainment. One respondent quoted the movie Training Day (incidentally, great film): “He [Denzel Washington] holds up the newspaper and says, “It’s 90% bullshit, but it entertains me, and that’s why I read it”. I have that view.” Given the news landscape over the past five years in all those countries, it’s not hard to see why people have this view. We’ve packed a lot in, and the media machine has whirred through stories faster than ever.
But that reading that we’ve packed a lot in wasn’t necessarily shared by many respondents. They felt that the news was “tediously predictable, cyclical, and never changing.” It’s perhaps a natural bedfellow of “news as entertainment” that people don’t want to see the main characters doing the same things all the time. They want more ‘new’ in their news (as someone who until last year spent all my time in an office with rolling news coverage on TV, I can understand this).
Feeling entertained by the fresh news isn’t necessarily a lean-back experience for those interviewed. If we revisit the Training Day quote, the first part looms large in people’s perceptions of news: “It’s 90% bullshit”.
“Although interviewees often disagreed about what they meant by impartial news, many were convinced that the best way to respond to pervasive bias in coverage was the same: generalised scepticism or distrust of all news outlets as a form of protection from being misled or manipulated.”
As the report states, understanding “trust in news” can’t be based on simple binaries — x% of people do or don’t trust the news. All the respondents want to feel informed about current events but wanted to do so on their terms — choosing sources that feel familiar and that speak to their place in the world, doing their research, applying their pinch of salt,
In short, the consumption of news is highly subjective. A simple stat or headline around people not trusting the news fails to take this into account.
We often paint the picture that current attitudes towards the news and media directly result from the annus horribilis that was 2016. It’s the narrative that says Brexit and Trump changed the paradigm and spelt the beginning of the end of “trust in news”.
Indeed, a broad search of news outlets and Twitter for “trust in news” shows a massive and consistent uptick in conversation around the term since June 2016.
But the truth is that trust in the news was in decline well before 2016. Data from Gallup shows that since the late 00s, trust in mass media has fallen steadily (the US only).
That previously mentioned popular narrative says that the Brexit and Trump campaigns changed the game by taking advantage of paid social targeting to change the rules of political campaigning.
A more extensive reading says that both those campaigns weren’t trailblazing or revolutionary at all. They used classic campaigning models and succeeded through a better understanding of audiences. They capitalised on a long-term feeling that the news is “90% bullshit” and dragged it into the mainstream conversation.
Trust in news and the associated subjective attitudes are things we all need to reckon with in the comms world; it’s not just an issue for media outlets. As comms practitioners, we need to unpack the attitude that the news is “90% bullshit, but it entertains me, and that’s why I read it”.
How do we do that? I’ve got two ideas:
Idea one: we can’t just assume that audiences necessarily care about a topic because the UK media is heavily covering it. Witness the furore around the Prime Minister’s refurbishment. It was big news, but does anyone care? It certainly didn’t hurt the Conservatives in the recent local elections. If we want to know whether critical audiences were affected by a story, we need to do some research and probably ask people.
Idea two: seriously consider narrative fatigue. Take COP26 as an example. We’ve got six months until the actual event and lots of staging posts before then. Leaving aside whether anyone disconnected from Westminster cares yet, we need to make sure any activity doesn’t suffer from the perception of being “tediously predictable, cyclical, and never changing”.
We also need to make sure we don’t suffer our own narrative fatigue about the way audiences consume news — the landscape is set for further changes with the so-called “cookiepocalypse” and rumours of Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages) containing more information and fewer links. The only constant is change — how people react is what we need to care about.
