Transparency to the Rescue?

Abstract

Transparency has emerged as an ethical principle in contemporary journalism and is contended to improve accountability and credibility by journalists and scholars alike. However, to date, few attempts have been made to record the public's views on transparency. This study enriches current knowledge by using data from an experiment, survey and focus groups in Sweden collected between 2013 and 2015. Overall, the results suggest that the respondents are not particularly moved by transparency in any form; it does not produce much effect in the experiments and is not brought up in the focus groups. While that is the key finding of this study, it should also be noted that various forms of user participation are evaluated negatively, while providing hyperlinks, explaining news selection and framing, and correcting errors are viewed positively. Implications for journalism practice and research are discussed.

‘There were some clues’: a qualitative study of heuristics used by parents of adolescents to make credibility judgements of online health news articles citing research

“…10 Research has shown that journalist’s inclusion of links in news articles to source documents, including scientific studies, increases readers’ perceived transparency of the story and positively influences their perceptions of media credibility. 38 In this study, participants confirmed this research by noting the link presence as a cue for credibility. However, while this is encouraging, participants’ behaviour, which included limited clicking of links to the included scientific papers, suggests a potentially missed opportunity for further learning and signals a need for future research to understand the hesitation to click and directly engage with primary research sources.…”

The effects of journalistic transparency on credibility assessments and engagement intentions

“…Pozil and Hacker, 2017; Schnackenberg and Tomlinson, 2016; Shapiro, 1987; Wheeless and Grotz, 1977), our findings differ from the study most closely related to the present endeavor: Karlsson et al (2014) conclude that transparency elements do not affect credibility ratings. It is not possible to know why our results differ without further research, but differences in the context (US vs Sweden; see Karlsson and Clerwall, 2018), approach (testing multiple transparency elements at once vs one at a time), and statistical power (approximately 65 study participants per condition vs the approximately 200 participants per condition in this study) seem reasonable candidates. The US context in particular may be unique, given the low levels of media trust.…”

“…Skeptics of transparency’s ability to restore news credibility also have experimental support. Karlsson and colleagues (2014, 2018) envisioned transparency elements as containing information about corrections to a story, information about and a link to earlier versions of the story, an explanation of how and why a story was written, the disclosure of a journalist’s opinion about the story being reported, timestamps detailing when the article was published, and internal and external hyperlinks. Their study tested each of 20 transparency elements separately, compared to a control condition with no transparency elements.…”

“…Yet, Karlsson and colleagues concluded their study with a call for further research, including using different treatments and transparency techniques. In summarizing their research, Karlsson and Clerwall (2018) suggested that some efforts at transparency – including providing a rationale for why a story is being covered in the news or hyperlinks to source information – could prove to be useful assets for news organizations.…”

“…This is in contrast to the Swedish context analyzed by Karlsson et al (2014), which they note is characterized by high media trust. Indeed, Karlsson and Clerwall (2018) are explicit in stating that their experimental, survey, and focus group results may ‘be impacted by the cultural context in which they were collected’ (p. 1931). For example, high levels of trust may yield ceiling effects, making it difficult for any transparency initiative to measurably increase credibility assessments.…”