Brexit and Alt-right, both connected with the same political events respectively, vied for the OED’s top slot along with Coulrophobia (a fear of clowns) and the Danish concept of cosiness, Hygge, but post-truth united the dictionary meisters on both sides of the Atlantic for the first time in years.
Trust in the news, in journalists, in media organisations and experts has been a recurring theme in 2016. The year opened with howls of a revived Nazi era slogan, the lying press (lugenpresse), over the New Year’s Eve assaults on female revellers in Cologne and other cities in Germany and an alleged press cover-up.
Trust in the news gained momentum with concerns about fake news sites, yellow journalism, clickbait content, slogans/memes/tweets and satirical news sites replacing serious debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Other chilling media issues such as the clampdown on journalists and media organisations/democratic institutions in Turkey or the ongoing rate of journalistic and media staff killed doing their job, mostly in war zones, in 2016 (75 according to the International Federation of Journalists up to November 2016) got much less exposure by comparison.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2016 eschewed truthiness – another term popularised in 2016 by American comedian Stephen Colbert. It refers to something akin to truth that feels right regardless of the facts. But the report had presaged some of the topical political, social and media discourses of the year based on survey data, interviews and country analyse, in its fifth annual media report published in the summer.
It made third-year media students in Marbella International University Centre groan. “It’s boring.” I asked for an elaboration, more information on what boring means and was told that at 184-pages, choc-full of text and with no videos, animations or any other easy-to-digest formats that they weren’t enamoured by it and it wasn’t fit for consumption by them or their peers. It wasn’t the content, it was the presentation of the lack of multimedia presentation, they assured me.
Notwithstanding their critique this year’s survey is interesting because it was twice as big as the 2015 one, covering 50,000 people in 26 countries, and is the largest ongoing comparative study of news consumption in OECD countries commissioned by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The Reuters Report highlights four key media business concerns about the future of the news industry – the move to mobile; the role of technical platforms and other intermediaries; the rise of ad-blocking software; evidence of distributed content and social media as an increasing source of news. The latter is the issue that provides a mine of information for the industry insider but especially those interested in the future of news.
Its focus group surveys also casts light on current media trends especially the move to social networks that were amplified this summer by the seismic shocks of the Brexit and US presidential vote. The fallout to this brave new world feeds into fears over the future of European liberal democracies with upcoming elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands where populist leaders are gaining ground. The 2017 report will no doubt look into this crossover between tech companies and news that is not only exercising the media and political fields but also academia.
Some of the key news consumption findings of the report show that:
- More than half, at 51%, use social media as a source of news each week with 12% saying it is their main source and Facebook as the most important network
- Women and young people in particular use social media and are less likely to use a news website or app
- For the first time 28% of those aged 18-24 say social media is their main source of news rather than TV (24%)
- TV is still important for older groups bit it declines with age especially for young people
- Smarpthone usage is mostly up for news (53%), computer use is falling and tablet use is levelling out
- Smartphone users access news more frequently than computer or tablet users
- Consumers are reluctant to pay for news online
- 78% of consumers still rely on text rather than video
Social media and personalised news apps are changing the landscape so the report’s researchers decided to go into more detail this year on the role algorithms are playing in story selection. One of the biggest challenges in the five years since the report began has been the rise of news accessed through social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and others. Facebook’s move into the news field increased dramatically in the last year (to June 2016) as did interest in its news selection algorithms. For example where did you first learn of, say, Davie Bowie, Prince or Leonard Cohen’s deaths: on television or in a newspaper?
Some of the factors that editors but increasingly tech companies select to prioritise news stories include:
- Recency and popularity
- What you’ve read before
- What friends have been reading and sharing
www.rollingstone.com/culture/pictures/10-most-despicable-stories-breitbart-published-under-bannon-w452226/muslim-immigrants-are-to-blame-for-crime-in-europe-w452227
The Reuters survey showed that people were happy when 36% of stories were based automatically on what they read before; the judgement of editors and journalists for 30% of respondents and 22% were happy based on friends’ consumption. It also showed concerns about personalised news and algorithms though young people trust algorithms more than editors. Doubts raised about the possible negative inputs of social media were highest with Norwegian and British respondents fearing key information or challenging viewpoints may be lost in a mathematical-driven filter bubble.
“There are two contradictory but important messages in this year’s data. On the one hand we see publishers losing control of distribution, some consumers not noticing where content comes from, and the growing influence of platforms and algorithms. And yet at the same time we find, both in our survey data and our qualitative work, that people still want, value, and identify with traditional news brands.”
Traditional news brands can breathe a sigh of relief despite the doom and gloom over truthiness and post-truth. News organisations and brands matter. This year’s report explored the question of trust in news organisations and journalists and found huge variations in the 26 countries. In wealthy western European and particularly Scandanavian countries with strong public sector broadcasters trust was higher while in the US (33%) and southern Europe- and especially in Greece at 20% – trust was the lowest. And the data showed that news brands, rather than individual journalists, are the key drivers of trust in the news.
Some findings in relation to trust in the news and news brand were:
- Trust in news is highest in Finland at 65% and lowest in Greece at 20%.
- Almost everywhere, editors and journalists are trusted less than news organisations
- Editors still play a considerable role in shaping news agendas directly and influencing stories that emerge elsewhere
- Main usage online remains with brands that have a strong news heritage and reputation gained over time
- News brands get noticed less than half the time in the UK and Canada and only a quarter of the time in Japan and South Korea due to widespread use of aggregated and distributed news
Across the focus groups in the four countries – the US, the UK, Germany and Spain – trust in the news is strongly tied to trust in specific news brands. And this is more important than trust in individual journalists. Trust in brands takes a long time to build and older is seen as better even though newer online brands may have more reach. The report found that trust does not map well onto demographic variables. Political beliefs are linked to trust in news though. In Finland, where trust in news is high politics is not an indicator of trust levels. In the UK where trust is high at 51% left leaning people don’t trust the news media whereas right leaning people trust much more.
“Although aggregators and social media are important gateways to news, most of the content consumed still comes from newspaper groups, broadcasters, or digital born brands that have invested in original content. Across all of our 26 countries over two-thirds of our sample (69%) access a newspaper brand online each week, with almost as many (62%) accessing the online service of a broadcasting outlet.”
There has been a lot of concern in recent months about how the conventional news media and traditional political campaigns react to political debates built around slogans and memes. But social media has been used before in campaigns, the use of Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts and Obama’s election campaign eight years ago as well as by Democratic Party contender Bernie Sanders. What many in the media forget is the loss of trust in mainstream media outlets in the US and UK, among others, was engendered as a result of the coverage of the dodgy dossiers and the propaganda in favour of war in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Despite all the hype about the post-truth concerns of 2016 the term was first used in its current context by Serbian American playwright Steve Tesich in 1992. And it was also used in relation to an American presidential scandal. Published in the Nation magazine the essay was on the Iran-Contra affair linked to then president Ronald Reagan.
Author: Mary O’Carroll
