No abstract

The trustworthiness of journalistic sources has always been a crucial element of journalistic working patterns and gained recently prominence in the public discourse about spectacular verification fails. To ensure the correctness of news, journalists have to trust their sources to deliver reliable information. This article explores trust building processes in the relationship between journalists and distant sources they access online. Sociological and psychological trust literature and research on credibility are used to develop an analytical model of reflexive trust in journalistic sources. Based on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with German journalists, the model is applied to relationships between home-based journalists and sources based in crisis regions.

Online media offer unprecedented access to digital public spheres, largely enhancing users’ opportunities for participation and providing new means for strengthening democratic discourse. At the same time, the last decades have demonstrated that online discourses are often characterised by so-called ‘dark participation’ the spreading of lies and incivility. Using ‘problematic behaviour theory’ as framework and focusing on incivility as a specific form of dark participation, this article investigates the role of users’ personal characteristics, media use, and online experiences in relation to offensive and hateful online behaviour. Using a random-quota survey of the German population, we explored how dark personality traits, political attitudes and emotions, the frequency and spaces of online-media use, and users’ experiences with both civil and uncivil online discourses predicted participants own uncivil behaviour, such as posting, sharing, or liking uncivil content. We found that 46% of the participants who had witnessed incivility in the last three months also engaged in uncivil participation. A hierarchical logistic regression analysis showed that incivility was associated with manipulative personality traits as measured by the dark triad, right-wing populist voting intentions, and frequent social-media use. Experiences with both civil comments and hate speech predicted higher levels of uncivil participation. The strongest predictor was participants’ personal experiences with online victimisation. Overall, the results confirmed that dark participation in the sense of uncivil engagement results from the interplay of personality traits, an online environment that allows for deviant engagement, and, most importantly, participants’ experiences in said environment.

Scientists (and science as a whole) provide evidence and advice for societal problem solving and collective decision-making. For this advice to be heard, the public must be willing to trust science, where “trust” means that one can confidently expect science to provide reliable knowledge and evidence, even if one’s understanding of science is bounded. According to the sociological and psychological literature, citizens’ basic attitudes toward, experiences with, and perceived trustworthiness of the trustee serve as antecedents of trust. From this, we developed a model for the public’s trust in science, and we tested this model in a nationally representative survey in Switzerland (N = 1,050). The analysis reveals that trust in science was best predicted by positivistic attitudes toward science (β = 0.33) and to a lesser extent by trustworthiness assessments of scientists (β = 0.24). Experiences with science did not predict trust in science (β = 0.07). These results suggest that stable basic attitudes toward science and its role in society are grounds on which trust in science can be built.

Political communication via social media might well counter the eroding political trust. In particular, social networking sites (SNS) enable direct flows of communication between citizens and the political elite, thereby reducing social and political gaps. Based on the concept of personalization of politics, we argue that interactions with politicians on SNS affect trust in government through a two-step process: First, interactions on SNS make citizens evaluate politicians’ characters more favorably. Second, these evaluations serve as cues for the citizens to develop or withdraw trust in government. We test indirect effects using four character traits as mediators: leadership, benevolence, responsiveness, and likeability. A representative online survey ( n = 1117; in Germany) reveals that interactions with politicians on SNS increase the perceived likeability of candidates, and thus also trust in government. However, they do not affect the evaluation of the other traits: leadership, benevolence, and responsiveness.