One solution to distrust in the media: Show your working

For the mainstream media, explaining is not losing.

Credit: Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd. Artist unknown :"Willie, the Inkslinger"; Credit, commerce, industries and property; he would sacrifice all to feed his vanity. Christchurch, Whitcombe & Tombs, [1890].. Ref: A-014-015. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22532334

Kiwis are increasingly distrustful of mainstream news media. You can see this in AUT’s new release of its annual survey, which found just 33% of the country trust the news most of the time, or from opening any social media website.

AUT’s survey provided plenty of ammo for mainstream media’s traditional enemies, particularly as the media itself wrung its hands over the results. Often these enemies are media entrepreneurs who use their difference from the mainstream media as their main selling point - generally while delivering little more than opinion and analysis built on facts established by the MSM they love to hate. Others here and abroad just don’t seem to like that there is a power source they can’t control which can say mean things about them: See basically every time a local businessperson uses the phrase “tall poppy syndrome”.

But I’m not here to write another stirring diatribe about the importance of good widely-read news reporting, to explain the economic sources of our decline, or to paint all of those 67% of Kiwis as idiots. Even if we ignore the people who have a quasi-financial interest in hating journalism, there are some good faith people who point out that other industries don’t just complain about their customers when the customers sour on their product¹.

Instead I want to offer one partial-solution. Show your working.

Now, I am far from the first person to suggest something similar, and there are people who have been in the business longer than I’ve been alive in New Zealand who are doing work to fix this problem. But as I am writing from (hopefully temporary) exile from daily reporting I figured I might be able to be a bit more frank.

Before I explain why showing our working is so crucial, let me lay out an unbaked theory on the increase in media distrust.

• News websites do feature more opinion content than traditional outlets used to, and every opinion article is a chance to make someone hate you. This is because opinion is cheap and often very well-read, while journalism is expensive and sometimes unpopular.

• The above problem is part of a wider issue with internet journalism: We have too many metrics now, and the metrics incentivise cheap content that draws eyeballs in the short term, not quality content that builds trust. Those incentives can be (and often are!) ignored, but do have some impact. This is a world away from the bundled world of traditional newspapers or TV bulletins, where audiences were generally fed their vegetables alongside dessert.

• People read the news as a series of atomised and disconnected articles now, rather than as a single bundled product. When you just see some disconnected articles shared on social media by someone mad at them instead of the whole news product it is easier to dismiss the rest of the content.

• The highpoint of media trust recorded in this specific survey was in 2020, when the country was under something like war mobilisation against a virus, and was remarkably united politically.

• The Public Interest Journalism Fund became a meme. The meme spread so far because it had the tissue of truth (the Government was funding journalism) hiding the big dumb lie behind it (the Government was not buying off journalists for uncritical coverage, NZ On Air is a statutorily independent body that has been funding journalism for decades, and the clause about the Treaty is not a smoking gun.)

• The country is changing in various ways and the news media is often where this change is experienced, and is thus consciously or unconsciously blamed for it. If you hate the rightward-shift of the electorate it is much easier to blame the media than the country as a whole. If you hate increasing social liberalism it’s easy to blame a media conspiracy pushing “rainbow ideology”. This is intensified by the natural inclination of online media to write provocative headlines.

• There are far fewer reporters than there used to be and the ones left over are clustered near centres of power or chained to their desk. You can’t see them on the sidelines of your local school rugby game any more - they are in a room somewhere in Auckland or Wellington.

This is not a complete picture and I’m not the first to point these issues out. But I think we can start to address these issues by lifting the curtain a bit.

Why explaining is winning for reporters

The most common defence we have to all the problems identified above is that the readers don’t get it. They don’t understand the process that goes into professional reporting, so they equalise a blog post and a piece of news that cost tens of thousands in lawyers’ time to get published. They don’t understand that some days reporters are expected to write three or four major stories because of how the internet has decimated the advertising market. They think because you believe an MP saying a certain thing is newsworthy you either hate or totally agree with said politician.

This defence is far from perfect, but it has merits. And the best way to deploy it is not to quietly complain to each other on social media, it is to be as transparent as possible about all the decisions that go into a news story.

Let me use some examples from my own career, not because I am anything special, but simply because I am the one writing this piece. (There are many reporters who already do a better job at this than me.)

I try to respond to people on Twitter who complain to me or ask questions my reporting. I don’t reply to everything or to people clearly trying to bait me, but where. I can I find that engaging is useful and disarms the haters somewhat, who often see you as an entity not a normal person.

Often those who are the most cynical about me accuse me of having sat on the balcony during the Parliament protests about the vaccine mandates. I usually reply with a link to one of the YouTube videos of me walking through the protests livestreaming every single interaction I had, from cordial interviews to attempts to bar me from entry. This usually ends the argument!

I was far from the only reporter to go right into the protests, but I have taken the obvious lesson from the experience: Showing your working works. If a reader can see with their own two eyes the exact process that went into you reporting something, they are far less likely to assume ulterior motives or evil manipulation of facts - after all they get to experience the same thing as you.

You can extend this to pieces of written journalism when you have the room to do so.

In a recent piece of mine on the public service for Stuff I was at pains to explain the reporting decisions I had to make in order to make the story possible, such as using the Public Service Commission’s definition of what a public servant was. I was happy to admit that this was not a perfect definition, but it had the virtue of already existing. Despite the piece covering very politically sensitive grounds, I have not received much hate from anyone who seems to have read the story.

I think what is crucial here is not just showing off, but also showing humility. It’s easy and very satisfying to write the sentences the New York Times often writes, the ones about how they talked to 47 sources for a story or something². It’s harder to admit in the terse language of news writing what you don’t know - where there are gaps in our collective or individual knowledge of a topic³. It’s hard too to admit to assumptions - but we still should do so. Sometimes those assumptions are very defendable and should be explained - like say the assumption that political polls that meet certain professional standards do represent the views of the country. At other times the process of checking some hunch or assumption is the meat of actual reporting.

This doesn’t mean constantly second-guessing yourself. It means treating audiences as adults who deserve to see some of the ingredients of the meal, not just what’s on the plate. When done well - and many reporters are fantastic at this already - it brings audiences with you and makes them properly trust your reporting. Hopefully even those who disagree with your reporting decisions can pinpoint why they disagree with them, and may decide that you have made an innocent mistake, rather than a biased one.

There are limits of course. Some reporting processes are opaque to protect sources. Mediums that aren’t online have space constraints that make this kind of explanation of reporting decisions impossible. If you spend all your time arguing about your reporting process online you won’t have enough time to go out and get more stories.

But I do think we should lift the curtain a whole lot more. Because in my experience what it generally shown behind that curtain is not anything partisan, but just a group of overworked people trying to tell stories that both inform and excite readers. Where mistakes are made - and they are! - they generally come not from bias but from a lack of time to do the job properly. Explaining all of that can only help.

Recommended reading

• It’s been a long time, again! In the weeks since we last talked I’ve started a new monthly column in North and South, so pick that up if you want to read more of me. I’ve also written a long piece about the challenge facing Chris Bishop in housing for Stuff.

• Stuff’s running tally of public service cuts are a great example of showing your working.

• This piece from +972 on a new AI tool used by the IDF.

• Thomas Coughlan’s exit interview with Grant Robertson.

• The Infrastructure Commission’s scathing view on Auckland Light Rail.

• Times Radio on the Labour MP they made up.

1. How far readers have really soured is of course an interesting question. People still read a whole lot of mainstream news!

2. To be fair, actually talking to those 47 people and synthesising their views is not easy, so this bragging is justified.

3. Ironically, one of the reason readers like analysis and opinion is the ability for this type of writing to more easily admit to being just one person’s set of assumptions.