News Literacy

LAST OCTOBER, STUDENTS in Sarah Candler’s seventh-grade English class in rural Tennessee were discussing the presidential election, echoing each other’s pro-Trump sentiments. One student dared the others: “Who’s a Democrat, anyway?”

A lone girl raised her hand. “I saw looks aghast from the other kids,” recalls Candler. Then Candler, too, raised her hand.

Facebook has announced on Twitter that it will start testing a pop-up that asks users if they’re sure they want to share an article that they haven’t opened. The pop-up will prompt users to read the article, but they can also choose to continue sharing it if they want. A Facebook spokesperson said the test would be rolled out to 6 percent of Android users worldwide.

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the debate over journalists’ use of anonymous sources, and this has included criticism directly from President Donald Trump. Survey data from earlier this year shows that most Americans see a place for journalists to use anonymous sources, but few think journalists should have carte blanche to use them when reporting the news.

Journalism faces a well-documented crisis of trust. This long-running decline in public confidence in the press is part of a broader skepticism that has developed about the trustworthiness of institutions more generally — leading to an overall trust recession that worries observers who speculate about the endgame of this downward spiral.

But might we see these issues of news and trust in a new light if we reconsidered our assumptions about what actually leads people to develop trust in journalism?

Who would buy a product that reliably makes them sad, or anxious, or worried, or overwhelmed?
You wouldn’t go to a restaurant you knew made you feel ill, or listen to music that drove you up a wall, or go to a gym where the equipment gives you a new muscle tear every visit. You might do it once or twice, maaaaybe three times — but it’s unlikely you’d keep signing up for more pain, day after day.

In a year filled with major news stories – from impeachment to a contentious election, from a global pandemic to nationwide protests over racial injustice – Americans continue to have a complicated relationship with the news media.