By Sophia Scolman
In 2016, America’s trust in mass media plummeted to 32%, a new low repeated in findings from October 2023, according to Gallup polling.
According to Trusting News Executive Director Joy Mayer, trust in news has declined as the media landscape has grown more complex. Americans once had a few TV and radio stations and a print newspaper, but now access a complex media environment including social media and online news.
“It was easier to wrap your head around how journalism operated because there wasn’t that much variety,” Mayer said. “Trust started to decline the more complicated the media landscape got.”
Today, when journalists get things wrong, they do so in an atmosphere of distrust.
“In general, people don’t understand how journalism operates, and when they don’t understand, they don’t give us the benefit of the doubt,” Mayer said. “A lot of people will jump to the conclusion that means the newsroom doesn’t really care that much about getting it right, or that they were lazy and failed to double check things.”
But, by issuing corrections and “pulling back the curtain,” news media can build credibility through transparency, Mayer said.
What is accurate information?
While transparency can help build audience trust, journalists and their audiences often have different ideas about accuracy, said Deborah Dwyer, who studied accuracy in journalism while earning her PhD in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and consults with newsrooms. Journalists focus on being accurate at the time they publish, while audiences expect accuracy when they consume the content — even if facts or context have changed over time.
This is especially relevant in crime reporting, where information was correct at the time of publication but has since changed, Dwyer said.
In those cases, Dwyer emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between updates, which are caused by changing information, and corrections, used when a newsroom initially got something wrong.
“You don’t want to be throwing around the word correction,” Dwyer said. “People already have a low enough opinion of journalists. So we don’t want to call something a correction … if it’s an update.”
These distinctions can reduce the number of “corrections” put out by a publication that may damage audience trust.
Building and using a newsroom corrections policy
Mayer’s organization, Trusting News, publishes resources for newsrooms and journalists looking to increase audience trust, including one “Trust Kit” which offers a set of discussion questions for teams to consider when they develop a correction policy. Many of the Trust Kits provide a step-by-step guide of industry do’s and don’ts. Corrections policies, though, aren’t one size fits all, Mayer said.
“A lot of what we do is about addressing organizational culture and the priorities of doing journalism,” Mayer said. “So our recommendations need to be flexible enough to work within different newsroom cultures.”
Mayer said remote work and newsroom downsizing mean less face-to-face interactions, which can hinder consistent practices for post-publication editing.
Mayer said factors like organization structure, platform, audience expectations and comfort with transparency vary across newsrooms and influence what their policy will look like.
And building the policy is just one aspect of standardizing corrections. It’s not uncommon for newsrooms to have policies that many reporters aren’t aware of, don’t rely on regularly or that aren’t applied consistently by editors, Mayer said.
Unevenly applied but publicly available corrections policies pose a big issue for newsrooms looking to earn trust, Mayer said. Lifting the curtain on newsroom policies means that readers can tell whether those policies are being followed.
NewsGuard, which creates tools to counter misinformation for companies and readers, takes into consideration corrections processes in its “News Reliability Ratings.” This tool, which is a browser extension that shows a reliability rating at the top of more than 350,000 websites, assigns 12.5% of its score to corrections practices.
But it’s the act of publishing corrections – not simply having a corrections policy – that makes websites eligible to receive points in this section.
“The worst thing you can do is have a policy and not follow it,” Mayer said. “That’s worse than not having one at all because you’re basically inviting your community or your audience to hold you accountable for something that you’re not actually doing or that you haven’t fully embraced.”
Developing a policy
Dwyer said strong correction and update policies should begin with newsroom examination of what they will and will not publish and when. For example, if a newsroom plans to publish everything that comes through their local police blotter, they can also expect to publish a lot of updates.
“Part of it starts with how fast and loose are you on the front end,” Dwyer said.
NewsGuard Senior Editor Peggy Ackerman said good corrections simply state the correct information without repeating the incorrect information. California Lutheran University professor Kirstie Hettinga recommended that corrections don’t include the source of the error.
“The bottom line is that the readers don’t care about that,” Hettinga said.
Some newsrooms will offer to write a follow-up story, especially in regard to crime reporting when information has changed. But Dwyer said this should only be done if the original story and the follow-up story are clearly linked to each other, to avoid confusion.
Further, Dwyer recommended that newsrooms make it clear how to contact them about correction requests, decreasing the disparity between well-connected members of the public and those who may not have the means or knowledge to call out erroneous information. This strategy has the added benefit of allowing readers to raise the problem directly to the newsroom staff who have the ability to correct an error.
Most importantly, Mayer encouraged journalists to remember that they are “part of ‘the media,’” which means their work fits into the mosaic of today’s complicated media landscape, for better or worse.
“Don’t expect automatic trust,” Mayer said. “Figure out what you have to do to earn it, and figure out what it is that sets you apart from less responsible messages.”
Experiencing error
While these guidelines provide a framework for correction practices, the actual process of acknowledging and correcting errors affects journalists on a deeply personal level, according to an ethnographic study conducted by Hettinga in 2013.
“How journalists experience error is deeply personal and has to do a lot with individual journalists’ ethics and sense of commitment to the field,” Hettinga said.
One participant in Hettinga’s study said realizing they’d made an error felt like getting kicked in the gut by a mule, while another said it ruins their day to learn that they were involved in the publication of an error.
Hettinga found that since reporters were typically the ones being notified or discovering the error themselves, correcting the record becomes an issue of professional ethics. She also noted that some newsrooms provide incentives for fewer errors or punishments for more frequent errors, which can create a “culture of cover-up or nondisclosure.”
To prevent this from happening, Hettinga said the “limited positive effect” of increased transparency between audiences and newsrooms should be emphasized to encourage journalists to be forthcoming with errors, while frequent errors could serve as an opportunity for professional development.
Being transparent about errors is an exercise in editorial constraint for journalists, who should strive to remain “loyal to the craft” despite the uncomfortable feelings that might come along with taking accountability, Dwyer said.
“Your public will respect you for owning up to it, and you have to respect yourself for owning up to it,” Dwyer said.
The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.