Trust and Journalistic Performance: Towards a Typology of Media-Audience Relations Beyond Western Democracies

Abstract

There has been a recently renewed interest in exploring the relationship between journalists and citizens. However, most studies have only focused on public trust in the media (Kohring and Matthes 2007; Hanitszch et al. 2015), with few analyzing how journalists perceive their audiences and how it affects their performance. Understanding these perceptions is crucial for a virtuous convergence between the media and civil society, particularly in contexts of violence and instability where mutual support cannot be taken for granted. In this study, we present a conceptual-descriptive typology (Collier et al. 2012) that categorizes journalists' perceptions of their audiences into three scenarios: full trust, partial trust, and mistrust. Our goal is to analyze how each scenario is related to journalistic performance. Based on 93 semi-structured interviews with journalists from 23 states in Mexico and an original database of local newspapers' contents, we argue that scenarios where journalists have full or partial trust in their audiences are associated with more assertive journalistic content, while scenarios where journalists lack support from their audiences lead to self-censorship.