Reporter bios don’t improve readers’ trust in news outlets
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
1. Have a reporter write a series of stories on several topics.
2. Label these stories with the same author name and have Group A read them.
3. Label these stories with a bunch of different names and have Group B read them.
4. Have both groups rate the trustworthiness of each story as they read them.
My theory is that we tend to trust sources we know more. I would expect that Group A would report higher levels of trust for the last stories they read, even if they disagree with the author, because they've been told they're reading the same person's work.
The way I personally read news reflects this. There are many authors on the news sources I frequent who I am familiar with. Some I consider to be heavily biased or idiots but, being familiar with their shortcomings, I feel I can get a better picture of the objective truth from their work than I can from reading something written by someone I know nothing about. I trust authors based on what I have read from them in the past rather than their biographies.
For this reason, bios and clearly visible author names/pictures may not increase the reader's trust in isolated articles, but it may help build trust with regular readers over time.
A lot of people seem to forget how much editing by more than one person actually goes into a lot of professional writing. Editors probably have the most control over things that end up published, more so than the original writers of a piece usually do.
Obviously being a crazy idiot doesn't help but being a good investigator and a good writer aren't the same thing.
While this sounds awesome in isolation (and is perhaps even a goal to aim for), I am in two minds about the reality of it.
In our society as it currently exists, most people are not in a position to collect, correctly understand and evaluate evidence for things outside their expertise. And some, like me, have very limited spheres of expertise to begin with. So people rely a lot on a "chain of trust" for informing their opinions and decisions. This is of course gameable and is indeed often gamed.
But I am not sure this is avoidable. It does not seem possible today to teach oneself to a point where as an individual you can form a fully independent opinion, solely based on the study of evidence, in any reasonable time for very many different things.
Maybe I am just pessimistic!
However I'd also argue that this is the only time in history that we have almost the whole of human knowledge accessible at our fingertips from anywhere in the world within fractions of a second. If there ever were a time that we could look up actual evidence without expending inordinate effort, that time is now!
This is also the point in time where we have the most disinformation swimming around the internet as well. And it takes effort, possibly an inordinate amount, to cull the bad information from the good. Or else we're in the same conundrum as we always have been about whom to trust.
Both of the biographies they used suggest that the article was written by generic, if competent, journalist. Neither include details that might push you towards trusting this specific person. Since the test article was about a 'superbug', imagine one profile said "Jim completed a masters in immunology at Columbia University before moving to NYU'S Carter Journalism Institute." Without that, it's hard to know whether readers just ignore these blurbs altogether...
The internet means they can be fact checked immediately. Which means they immediately will be found in error, large or small.
No one trusts any reporter anymore, that time has passed.
IME, people trust individuals more than institutions. So, their level of trust for the news organization doesn't really matter if they trust the specific journalist.