Trusting Others: A Pareto Distribution of Source and Message Credibility Among News Reporters

Abstract

This study uses the case study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, between source and message credibility evaluations, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings show that journalists can distinguish source and message credibility. However, in practice they rely on source evaluations as an “autopilot” default mode, shifting gears to observations of source and message credibility in epistemically complex cases. The proportion between both is close to Pareto distribution. This extreme division challenges both inductive and mixed inference theories of epistemic trust and suggests revisiting the “typification” doctrine of newswork. Data partially support the hegemony and “epistemic injustice” theory, showing that traditional credibility criteria might trigger the exclusion of nontraditional voices.

Changing Journalistic Information-Gathering Practices? Reliability in Everyday Information Gathering in High-Speed Newsrooms

“…Journalists themselves also usually talk of reliable sources, although there is a distinction between the reliability of sources and the reliability of the information provided by these sources. Recent research shows that journalists do differentiate between source credibility and message credibility, but source evaluation is the "autopilot" default mode (Barnoy and Reich 2020).…”

“…Although the journalists consider these sources as reliable, they nevertheless regularly also judge, and check and complete the information of these sources. Journalists did make a distinction between the sources and the information provided by the sources (see also Barnoy and Reich 2020).…”

“It’s my job”: A qualitative study of the mediatization of science within the scientist-journalist relationship

“…It also highlights the value of using methods such as talk-alouds or reconstructive interviews to anchor discussions of relatively abstract topics to real-world practices (cf. Barnoy & Reich, 2019, 2022]. For example, the scientists sometimes described their relationships and practices differently when answering general, open-ended questions than when discussing specific news stories during the “talk-aloud” portion of their interviews.…”

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“…Another strategy is to choose one of the data that is considered more valid, generally seen from the history and reputation of the agency that issued the data. Relying on the source credibility which is usually based on the source's 'officialness' or organizational role is not something new in journalism practice, this is journalists' 'autopilot' mode that functions more than two-thirds of the time (Barnoy & Reich, 2022). Journalists need to realize that their reliance on the official source means that alternative views are being overlooked.…”