At a time when trust in the media among Americans is at an all-time low, what can journalists and news organizations do to restore that trust? This episode's guests are working on innovative solutions with newsrooms and content creators across the country.
Joy Mayer is the executive director of Trusting News and Mollie Muchna is the organization's project manager. They, along with colleague Lynn Walsh, received the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2026 Brown Democracy Medal. They wrote the book "The Transparency Imperative: Journalism, Trust, and the Future of an Informed Democracy" as part of receiving the award.
Mayer and Muchna discuss experiments in rebuilding trust that Trusting News is conducting alongside news organizations and academic researchers, including letting members of the public sit in on newsroom editorial meetings and creating a code of ethics for independent news content creators. They also also talk about how nostalgia for the days of Walter Cronkite can interfere with this work — and why American media is never going back to that era.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem 00:00
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle 00:10
I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Jenna Spinelle 00:11
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Today we are talking with Joy Mayer and Mollie Muchna, who are two out of the three people that make up the team at Trusting News, they will tell you all about what they do here momentarily. But they are the recipients of the 2026 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute. So we had them here on campus a couple of weeks ago as we're recording this, and they met with students and gave a talk, and we found time to go record an interview. There's a lot here. We've certainly talked about the media a ton on this show, but it touches all of us in in different ways, including something Chris and I just learned about your connection to the newspaper industry when you were growing up,
Chris Beem 01:02
Yeah, I was part of the of the news. I was a paper carrier for the Omaha World Herald, and needless to say, this was a long time ago. I recognize that, but I just was thinking about it while I was. First of all, the brown metal lecture is on our.
Jenna Spinelle 01:20
It's on YouTube. Yep, I'll put the link in the show notes.
Chris Beem 01:22
And it's really worth your time because it really is a a very good lecture, and it really lays out the stuff well. Anyway, Omaha World Herald that was back in the 70s, and that point, everybody got the paper right on my route, 80, 90% of the people got the paper, and it was the best deal in the world. Right? It was cents. I think it was like a dime, maybe a quarter for the paper, and you got it delivered to your front door, and everybody read it, and that its function was not just to inform, but to create a community to talk about what the community was worried about, what were the issues, who was saying what about them. Not to mention sports, high school sports, and all that stuff. That was a long time ago, but we are in a very different world now, and a very different business model, right? So it can continue or once again perform these essential democratic functions.
Cyanne Loyle 02:30
And it's both democratic functions; it's the role of that community plays in a democracy, right? One of the things that I loved so much about the Brown Lecture is how many components of democracy journalism really touches on, so it's about creating the civic space. It's about informing the citizens in a democracy. It's about presenting viewpoints from the opposing side. Right. We'll talk about this a little bit later, I think. But even as we think about kind of polarization, journalism has a potential role to play in helping me interact with viewpoints that I may not be able to seek out on my own, or may not choose to seek out on my own, and so there's just so many opportunities here for what good journalism can build and can do. And I really appreciate Trusting News's more kind of scientific way in which they're gathering data and trying to to kind of empirically test and change many of the things that we complain about, right? So lack trust in the news, right? There's real ways to think about how to do this better and how to do that differently
Chris Beem 03:30
And I really appreciate the role that trusting news plays in that space. It is worth mentioning that on the one hand, journalism is especially local newspapers. Their job was to tell the truth, but for most of American history, newspapers had an explicit partisan point of view. Right? They they were not above the fray, they were. They said, "Listen, this is our bias, and we're going to tell you it, and we're going to inform you from that point of view." A local paper like the Omaha World Herald had to appeal to everybody, right? And so it wasn't as explicit about that, but it was a Republican paper, as was 95% of Nebraska. But in Chicago, for example, everybody knew that the Tribune is and was a Republican paper, and the Sun Times was and to some degree is a Democratic paper.
Cyanne Loyle 04:34
And and Chris, there's there's you're using words like the truth or bias or something like that. But when I think about some of these different papers that you mentioned, it's also just about it's about focus and interest.
Cyanne Loyle 04:46
In my work, I've done a bunch of work on the historical legacies of racial violence in the United States, and in that project, on a number of occasions, we've relied on African American newspapers because they were just better sources of information. The types of things that I was interested in, right? So they're more likely to report lynchings. They're more likely to report forced displacement of black households or black communities in the way that other more I don't even want to call them more mainstream papers, but just larger venues were more likely to overlook those particular incidents. And so it's not about truth or not truth either. It's just about what gets reported.
Cyanne Loyle 05:24
And so it's about what your readership is most interested in. And some of these things weren't even, at least in the research that I've done, they weren't even local events. They're national events, right? So national events of forced displacement or violence against the the black community that were reported in local newspapers because an identity-based community cared about that in a way.
Jenna Spinelle 05:43
Well, and I mean, Joy and and Mollie in the interview are very clear that we're not going back to the days of everybody in the neighborhood getting the Omaha World Herald, and even the days of multiple newspapers with different partisan points of view and the days of Walter Cronkite and the three networks, right? So one of the things I really appreciate about their work is that so much of it is forward-looking, as opposed to dwelling on. Gee, wasn't it so great when everybody got the same source of information that this is the climate that we're in now? What do we do about it?
Cyanne Loyle 06:22
The role of journalists, right? So journalism as a profession, right? As a skill, as you know, this is this is different. You know, it's they talk a little bit about in the interview, and we'll hear this working with influencers, right, and different types of of content creators. But even, but saying that this is not just about content creation, right? This is about how you gather information in a systemic way and present that information as non-biasedly or accurately as possible, or to tell a story or to answer a question. It's one of the things that I really appreciate is that if it is a skill, if it is a profession, then it's something you can improve upon.
Jenna Spinelle 06:58
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great place to end this part of the conversation, and let's hear now from Joy Mayer and Mollie Muchna of Trusting News.
Jenna Spinelle 07:13
Joy Mayer and Mollie Muchna, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.
Joy Mayer 07:17
Thank you. Good morning.
Mollie Muchna 07:18
Thanks for having us.
Jenna Spinelle 07:18
So very excited to have you on campus to receive our Brown Democracy Medal and talk with you about the book that you wrote along with your colleague Lynn Walsh, the Transparency Imperative: Journalism, Trust, and the Future of an Informed Democracy. Did I get that right? Yes, just small topics like that. A small problem we're trying to solve. So I want to talk about the origin story of the organization that you both are part of called Trusting News, but before we do, I want to maybe take a step back before that. Because I was thinking to myself, like, how long has trust in the media or lack thereof, as it might be, been something that people have been watching, been concerned about? I know Trusting News goes back to 2016, but I suspect that concerns about declining trust in the media go back a little bit farther than that.
Joy Mayer 08:07
Yeah, the in the years leading up to 2016, I was starting to hear journalists talk a lot more about the concern of not being trusted. I think the you know is is the more choices people have for information. The harder it is for them to see what is trustworthy, and the more they are justifiably skeptical about telling one news source from another. So I think that you know the early 2010s is when I started to see more discussion about it. Trust peaked in the late 70s in news and has been falling as choices increase. So talk radio, cable news, all before the internet. You know, the more the more options people have, the harder it is for them to discern which ones are worthy of trust.
Jenna Spinelle 08:50
Yeah, yeah, and and Mollie I know you joined Trusting News a few years after it started, but you were working in newsrooms before that. So, what did you see as far as as the public's trust, your audience trust, and the work that you were doing.
Mollie Muchna 09:05
Yeah, I mean, I was lucky. I happened to work at a newsroom that was one of the first newsrooms to kind of test some of the experiments with trusty news. And the first year, Joy was running the project and the research project, and so I was introduced to the ideas early on. But and then I continued to work in at newsrooms for the next couple of years, and what I saw throughout that span was like a growing gap of distrust. And obviously, in that time, the 2016 election happened, and it just seemed like that gap between journalists and the community kept widening. And it felt really frustrating working in a newsroom where I was working alongside a lot of colleagues who cared really deeply about providing public service to the community, and that was just less and less how the community was actually viewing us, and it was creating more and more division, and and more and more information was spreading, and so that was part of what motivated me to want to work with Joy and Lynn at Trusting News. Was just that it felt so frustrating to be trying to produce, you know, helpful service-oriented journalism. For our communities, but just seeing that distrust continue to grow.
Jenna Spinelle 10:04
In the book that you wrote, you talk a lot about bias, both political bias or perceptions of political bias, and also financial bias. And you actually cite an interview that I did just the next room over from where we're sitting here with Aisha Roscoe when she came to campus, and I asked her about the ways that NPR, where she works, is is perceived both from the outside and from the inside. There's often you know differing views there, and you pointed to that as a kind of quintessential summation of how journalists you bias. So tell us what that is, and and maybe how your thinking has evolved over the your time doing this trusting news work.
Joy Mayer 10:49
Yep. When asked about political bias or partisan bias in the news, I used to respond exactly as she responded to you, which is focusing on the intent of the journalists, people perceive that journalism is purposefully putting a thumb on the scale toward liberal ideas, liberal politicians. And my response used to be, of course, we're not intentionally putting our thumb on the scale. We don't even really talk about it, and there are people with mixed views across the newsroom, and we would never purposefully do that. Over time, the more time I have spent in conversation with news consumers and learning more about people's frustrations, the more I realize that it can't stop at intention. Newsrooms do, in fact, have more people who lean left in them. They do, in fact, the people who go into journalism tend to share values that more that push for a certain way of looking at the world, and we do in fact not represent in newsrooms the full diversity of views on the world that our communities often represent. And so, I think that if we're going to really address that concern, we need to look at the impact, not just the intention. Who feels seen and understood by the way we produce coverage, and who might feel that their values are not seen or not accurately reflected?
Jenna Spinelle 12:12
Yeah, and so the the next question I asked Aisha in that conversation was, I just sort of threw out as a hypothetical. Well, what if, at least a hypothetical to me at the time. What if the public could observe newsroom editorial meetings? I was thinking about research from political science that shows that when people who are skeptical about elections observe or are a poll worker or observe the polling process on election day, they their trust in elections goes up and starts like, wouldn't it be great if that same thing could happen in newsrooms? And it turns out that it already has. I read about it in your book. So tell me about some of those efforts and how they have related to audience trust in media.
Joy Mayer 12:54
Yeah, we we've done some research on that. We actually, as part of a research project, talking to people who lean right politically about how they feel about local news? We gathered a whole bunch of email addresses of people who are skeptical, and in one community, Cincinnati, we invited some of those folks who were skeptical in to watch a news meeting at a local TV station, and we interviewed them before and after. And it was so interesting to see which misassumptions of theirs were corrected, and what how their perceptions of the news changed. Just watching the discussion about it, and in general, they were very surprised about some core things. They were very surprised that there was such a small group of reporters. They kind of had this this idea that there were a million people out covering the world every day. They were happy to see that decisions were made locally; that there wasn't a parent company kind of pulling the strings. You mentioned perceptions of financial bias. A lot of people would assume that there are powerful people at the heads of news companies who are telling local journalists what to cover each day and how to cover it. And the folks we interviewed were happy to see that was not the case. There, there are definitely times though where I know when we're working with newsrooms, we hear the way that they talk about their world or the way they talk about the public, and think, "Gosh, I'm glad people can't hear this," because there are times where there's just an unintentional something is left out, or values and views of the journalists are influencing how they cover something in a way where I think if the public could see this, it would actually reinforce a lot of the concerns they have.
Jenna Spinelle 14:23
So, is that something you think can be replicated? Was there something unique about this station in Cincinnati and their openness to having people come in? I, you know, just as you said, I think that there's some parts of these conversations are probably better left behind closed doors. People want to feel like they can speak freely, but do you think that this is something that other news organizations can perhaps take on moving forward?
Joy Mayer 14:50
Yeah, absolutely. The public wants to see behind the curtain, and every time we are able to test it with academic researchers and say, "Do you prefer?". This traditional story, or this one that includes information about how and why we did it, or every time you do invite the public in to sort of witness how journalism is created, in literally or metaphorically, the public prefers the one with more transparency. So absolutely, it's something that journalists really should be leaning into.
Jenna Spinelle 15:19
So we were talking earlier about the the set of values that journalists holds, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about what those are. They probably won't be any surprise to listeners of a democracy podcast, but you know what what those values are and and where those ideas come from. I mean, there's been a lot of perceptions of of journalists in the public, you know, movies and TV shows, and going back to mr. Smith goes to Washington, right? Which I had to watch in journalism school. I don't know if you guys did up through, you know, Woodward and Bernstein and and all the rest of it. So yeah, where do those and is it the same set of perceptions that influence both journalists and audience members. I mean, they're sort of maybe both seeing these same media frames of of what it is to be a journalist.
Joy Mayer 16:09
Yeah, Tom Rosenstiel has a new book out called The Next Journalism, and in that book, he writes about five values that are really common for journalists. And it turns out that the the public only universally shares 20% of the public actually shares all five of those values, and they're things that are so obvious that it's kind of shocking to me that they're not more universally held. Things like you know what a good way to solve society's problems is to talk about them and shine a light on them. That people in power need to be held accountable. It turns out that the public is not always on board with the idea that that people in power need to be held accountable. A lot of people would say they need to be left alone to do their jobs. They need room to do their jobs. A lot of people would prefer that journalists spend more time talking about what is working and less time talking about what isn't working. Um, which the Solutions Journalism Network does a good job talking about. So it's just important, I think, for journalists to recognize that things they take for granted about how the public sees the world aren't true, and that we need to be a lot more curious about how the public sees the world. One example of that is how many marketing messages from newsrooms, how many public media fund drives say something about holding the powerful accountable. Do we realize that's not actually something that fires everybody up. Some people are like, "Gosh, quit being such a trouble. Quit stirring up trouble." You know, just let people do their jobs.
Jenna Spinelle 17:27
Yeah. Did you did you encounter that, Mollie? You're. You know, how did you navigate that that tension between holding the the people in power and the communities you were covering to holding them to account, and also taking into account what Joy was just saying about you know the public doesn't always share that you know Woodward and Bernstein got to go after them all the time sensibility.
Mollie Muchna 17:51
I think when I was still working in a newsroom, I wasn't even that didn't even occur to me. That didn't even occur to people in the newsroom at all. Like it wasn't even a question of whether people valued that, it was just like people should value this, and I think that comes in. That's something we talk about a lot at Trusting News too. Is kind of this moral superiority that journalists can sometimes have about being like, well, this is the right way to do things, and this is the way people should view things, and how how the world works, and kind of saying like, if you don't, if you don't, I mean, trying to be more generous to, but yeah, we can kind of be like, well, if people don't believe in that, just write those people off. If they're like, well, if they don't think that the powerful should be held accountable or we should be a watchdog, then like we just write those people off. When a lot of times maybe it's just language that we use that's not clear to them. It's not explaining kind of what it is, the purpose behind what we're doing, how that connects to like democratic principles and people's rights. And so I think there's a big gap that journalists could help fill in explaining some of those things to their audience. But I just think a lot of times journalists don't question it. I certainly didn't when I was working in a newsroom.
Jenna Spinelle 18:59
And we're also not taught to either, right? I mean, we are taught that everybody who holds a position of power is trying to cover something up and is probably corrupt. And there's there are nefarious things happening, right? So talk about the the work that you all do with journalism educators to help you know get some of these ideas into the classroom, so that hopefully, you know, of course, not every student will go into working in a in a newsroom or as a journalist. But the you know those who do that that these ideas will hopefully go with them into the professional world.
Joy Mayer 19:35
Yeah, really, what we're trying to do is create normative change in journalism and just update the job of a journalist. Update how we all see that. So the best way is to get in on the ground floor. Our wish for journalism students is that they would learn to be really curious about who they're serving. That they would think of their process of journalism as being one they invite the public into instead of just waiting and inviting people to passively consume. A finished story, whatever a story is these days, wouldn't it be great if journalists could start by saying, "Here are questions we are asking on behalf of the community, and here's why we're asking those questions, and here's where we're turning for information, and here's how we're going about answering them." So we have trust kits designed for educators that have assignments built in, and we really have a a belief that not that there should necessarily be a class in journalism schools on earning trust, but that throughout the curriculum, whether you're learning audience engagement or production or breaking news reporting or investigative reporting, that there are things you should be keeping in mind about the process of consuming news and the impact on the public.
Jenna Spinelle 20:42
And have you found that students are are receptive to that instruction? Because I'm thinking about you know I often when I teach introductory reporting, I have to spend some time teaching them what journalism even is because it's not something that they regularly consume. And so it seems like you're getting a blank canvas, so to speak, which could maybe be a good thing when it comes to you know teaching them this way of doing things from the start, as opposed to having to unlearn what they might have picked up from their own news consumption before they got to college.
Mollie Muchna 21:15
Yeah, definitely. I feel like sometimes student journalists are way more willing to try new ideas. The way they consume news is different than I think a lot of the ways, like the journalism school. The way we were taught was to do like very. I mean, at least I was on like a print track of journalism, so I very much learned how to write like the inverted pyramid style story to write to publish in the newspaper. And so I think because students' news habits are different, they are very like they understand these platforms more, they understand these mediums more, and yeah, I just think they're much more eager sometimes to to try out some of these ideas. And we've worked with some student newsrooms who are really, really amazing. I've been doing some really neat things.
Jenna Spinelle 21:54
And of course, a lot of folks are now getting their news from individual creators, whether they even think of it as consuming news, I guess, is a whole other question we could we could talk about. But I know you all have recently started doing some work about how content creators can build and strengthen trust with their audiences. What is that project, and how's it been going? Are are they receptive to it?
Mollie Muchna 22:19
Yeah. So we are currently running a research project with 10 creator journalists who kind of test different some of our core transparency strategies with these journalists who primarily share news in short form video on social media, and we're testing some of the the basic transparency strategies of our work, explaining your sourcing, explaining your funding, explaining who you are, some of the intentions and ethics and integrity behind your work, to see kind of how the audience responds. So we're working with a really great group of creators, a wide variety. I think what's interesting, we just wrapped up the first survey, so this isn't like actual research findings, just some anecdotal things. And overall, what we found was that actually, and we see this through other research too, that actually a lot of these creator journalists have quite a bit of trust with their audience, with the people already tuning into them. They they trust them a lot, like they turn to them as credible voices. But what we see is that there's they're showing up in these in news feeds and on social media alongside a lot of other different types of information. Some of it is much less credible. And so what I'm really curious to see with this research, and what I know, we're excited to learn. Is you know what sort of signals can they infuse? What sort of transparency can they put into their work that'll make it clear to audiences who are just you know, as you said, passively consuming news, aren't actively seeking it out. That will be like, oh, like this person, I can like, I don't even know maybe what it is, but I it seems like they have more ethics or integrity, or it seems like I can trust this information, and so I'm really curious to see that.
Jenna Spinelle 23:43
Yeah, and can you just say more about what a creator journalist is for listeners or viewers who might be unfamiliar with that term?
Mollie Muchna 23:50
Yeah, one of our frequent collaborators and partners, Liz Kelly Nelson, who runs an organization called Project C to kind of help journalists, creator model journalists, get off the ground has a great definition, and the way she describes it is: it's mostly journalists. It's people who are doing good journalism, but just doing it on other mediums and on other platforms. So it's not that the actual journalism is different or less credible or less fact-based or ethical. It's just that these creators are doing it on other platforms like Substack, like TikTok, like Instagram, and reaching audiences there.
Jenna Spinelle 24:24
Yeah, and and trying to build an audience for themselves as opposed to working for a news ad.
Joy Mayer 24:30
What's interesting is that some of these people would define themselves as journalists, and some would not. And we're agnostic about that part. It's not the public doesn't ask them for their label. We'll be interested. We'll see what the survey results tell us about what the public expects. But in general, we think about who is doing information, providing information in the spirit of journalism. Who is fact checking? Who is aiming primarily to inform people as a public service, as opposed to persuade people of something or entertain people? We're just trying to identify. For the public, who those creators are, and then help those creators stand out in a really crowded information ecosystem. It's genuinely very difficult when scrolling TikTok to tell what's credible and what's not. And so we're wherever people are turning for news, we want to help them find the signals of credibility.
Jenna Spinelle 25:19
Yeah, yeah, that's that's great. I always start my reporting class by having my students do a news diary. So over 24 hours, where do you come into contact with the news? And it's always TikTok and links that their parents text them to read, which they may or may not read. So that's great that you all are working with folks who are out on TikTok and these other platforms to help them get credible information into the world, but I want to back up to the some of the foundational ideas about trust and distrust in news that we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation. You know, some media studies scholars, including some who have been on this show, have argued that you know there's been a 30-year, maybe close to 40-year campaign by the the right wing in America to move the Overton window of what is acceptable as news, what points of view are considered newsworthy or worthy of of covering by journalists, and that's where some of the the distrust comes from. So I wonder, one, if if you would agree with that, and then also how you think about right wing media in the the context of the work that you do.
Joy Mayer 26:29
Yeah, I think that there's no. We obviously can't separate responsible journalism from the ecosystem they exist in, and they do exist in an ecosystem of more partisan media, more extreme ideas being gaining traction, a campaign absolutely to discredit their work that that adds to sort of an adversarial relationship that journalists have with parts of the public and with parts of the government. I I just I don't think that I think that it is possible to both agree that those things are true, and focus on what journalists can do about it. And I think that it is important that we look at how which ideas are represented in journalism and reflected in journalism, and create journalism that makes people more curious about how other people see the world and less polarized. There's really depressing research that people who consume more journalism actually have a less accurate view of people on the other side of politics. That that should be dispiriting for all of us. Journalism should ideally help you better understand a range of views, even the ones you find troubling, right? That's difference of opinion is a feature of democracy. It's not a malfunction of democracy. That is how this works. If we would like to govern together, we need to understand each other and be able to operate on the same playing field of facts and deliberate together. And journalism should be fuel for that.
Jenna Spinelle 27:58
Yeah, there's there's also lots of research to show that the more information people consume, the more it reinforces their political beliefs, identities, ideologies. So yeah, I think that curiosity you mentioned is is key both for journalists and for consumers. It would seem to sort of have that open mind as you're out there consuming all this stuff or having it delivered to you via an algorithm, or you know whatever way it it makes its way to you.
Joy Mayer 28:23
The algorithm, the algorithms are for sure a big piece of it. That we get fed things that make us more outraged and more entrenched. But journalism makes that too easy. I think that the it would be great if journalism did less highlighting of extreme views ourselves. That we found sources that have complicated views, or people who have changed their minds, or people who reflect complexity and nuance, as opposed to here's the soundbite from somebody on this end and the soundbite from somebody on this end, and we can predict how people will see that. But you know what? A lot of people don't actually feel reflected by that. They don't. It doesn't feel accurate because most people's views are actually nuanced and complicated. So there are a whole variety of reasons that journalists find those extreme sources, but we just need to do a better job reflecting a range of views.
Jenna Spinelle 29:10
Yeah, they're often the ones who are most willing to talk. Well, exactly,
Joy Mayer 29:13
they're the ones who show up at public meetings and have their sound bites ready because they have two minutes to speak at the public meeting. Right? They're the people who who most stridently stand behind their views? They're the people who feel most confident in answering questions. I was working with a journalist this year who was out trying to talk to people. It was after the Trump second inauguration, and she was she and her colleagues were spreading out across Oregon to ask people how they felt inauguration weekend, and she said, "Well, nine out of 10 people wouldn't talk to us, and so their story reflected what one out of 10 people said. Which, of course, nine out of 10 people don't want to talk. Maybe they're in a hurry and don't want to talk. Maybe they just don't have any interest in being in the news. But also, maybe their views are complicated, and maybe they don't have a soundbite ready, and maybe they didn't have an easy answer ready for the conversation. Maybe they didn't trust that they're. News would be reflected accurately. So even that story, with really well-intentioned reporting behind it, wasn't going to capture everybody. It was going to reflect the 10% of people who would respond.
Jenna Spinelle 30:11
So is that an instance where you would counsel that news organization and and that team of reporters to say in the story that look we tried to talk to 100 people. Only 10 of them would actually talk to
Joy Mayer 30:24
us. Yep, exactly, exactly. She, the reporter, was interviewing me for the story. Actually, I was a source for her story, and she asked me my favorite question for reporters to ask, which is, "What are you afraid I might get wrong?" And my answer was, "What you'll get wrong is if you do not acknowledge that the limitations of the sourcing methodology, and if who would respond, and so the story did end up recognizing this is, of course, only reflective of this subset.
Jenna Spinelle 30:51
So you also write in your book about news avoiders, and I think that that is a consequence of some of what we've been talking about here about media becoming more extreme, or just so much of things coming at us via an algorithm. It's easier than ever to just tune it all out, right? Like I was, or at least tune out the things that you don't want to see. I was, I saw a story a couple of weeks ago about how there are like 60 reporters covering the Philadelphia Eagles and like three covering City Hall in Philadelphia, so that you know shows that there's no no less demand for information. Maybe, but again, to that disconnect we were talking about, like not the information about civics and what's happening in your local government. That's not really reflective of at least what people seem to want or what news organizations are choosing to spend their money on hiring reporters on. So that's a long way around of asking if you could just yeah share a little bit more about how you think about news avoiders and if that's something that you know as as journalists think about their audiences should they be trying to convert, for lack of a better term, people who are inclined to tune out the news or focus on people who have already shown some interest, and I think that's a tricky tightrope to walk.
Mollie Muchna 32:13
I feel like news avoidance is a reflection. It's a good yeah reflection of how we're doing the news and what things might need to change about how we're doing the news, so absolutely, I think it's helpful information for journalists. We've learned a lot at Trusting News from some research, mostly from the Reuters Institute. In front of one of our research partners, Benjamin Toff wrote a book called "Avoiding the News" with a few other of his research partners as well, and they found a few core reasons why people avoid the news. Like you said, one is it? It's just not the news people are very interested in. Perhaps it doesn't resonate with them. People don't see why they should care about that. A lot of times, it's really depressing and overwhelming. It makes them feel bad. It feels bad for not only them emotionally, but also feels bad for society at large. Like, how often do we hear that from friends where it's like you know, like you shouldn't read the news. That's bad for you, right? I I hear that from people all the time, and just also that the I think another aspect is that the news is really hard to understand. A lot of times, the way journalism is written is for a certain demographic and a certain type of person, and it's really really challenging for everyday people to just plug in and quickly feel caught up on what's happening, especially about complex issues in politics or city council. So, yeah, a lot of the work we do with journalists is fundamentally helping them understand their audience's perceptions of the news and their news needs and where those gaps exist, and then and then thinking about news avoiders in that, and then really shifting their coverage to better meet those needs.
Jenna Spinelle 33:45
So as we come to the end of our time together, you know, you all are doing a lot of fantastic work to help journalists chart a new path forward, whether they're in a newsroom or working on their own. But I think it's tempting to fall into a nostalgia trap here to think about the days of Walter Cronkite and that time in the '70s when trust peaked. So, how do you think about that that trap and how both, I guess, journalists and news consumers can try to steer clear of it and focus on building something that will work for us in 2026 and beyond, as opposed to hearkening back to model to the past. We are never going back to a time
Joy Mayer 34:30
when most of the public turned to the same few news sources for information. We might go back to a time where there is more funding and support for journalism and more reporters out doing the work. I hope that we do, but we are absolutely existing in an information ecosystem that is splintered, where each piece of content travels around the world on its own, separate from the brand where it was created, and journalism. Have to learn how to actively earn trust in that attention economy, and if we don't, if we focus on nostalgia, if we hold tight to our routines, to our story formats that we've been that we were taught in journal that I was taught in journalism school way before you were taught it in journalism school, that's just not a productive path forward. So, really, at our core, what we're trying to do at Trusty News is help journalists understand what the public needs from them right now, so that they can change what they're doing to meet the need.
Jenna Spinelle 35:32
Okay. Well, Joy and Mollie, thank you so much for the book that you wrote, the work that you did. We'll link to it in the show notes, so folks can go buy it. And thank you for joining us today.
Joy Mayer 35:43
Thank you so much.
Chris Beem 35:50
All right, that was terrific. And if you want more, I absolutely encourage you to go get the book. It's actually available free for download, and you or you could buy it. That would be great too. And you can also go listen to the the Brown Metal lecture on on YouTube. Anyway, we were talking before Cyan about professionalism, ethics, sense of mission in journalism, and it reminded me of my own sense of failure as a person, because I'm just amazed at the bill at the ability of journalists, especially in the White House press corps, to keep their temper and to not respond to these absolutely outrageous, unfair attacks and almost chronic attacks by the president, calling them fake news, making personal attacks, especially towards women. It's not only is it completely beneath not just the the presidency, but even the behavior of a normal, decent human being to behave this way. But leave that aside. I just want to speak to the fact that these journalists are able to keep their composure, to keep their professionalism, and to do their job despite this climate. And I think that speaks to what we were talking about before. That's the sense of that journalism is not just any other job. Most people who are doing it feel this sense of responsibility and professionalism. And if you want any evidence that's still operative, just go watch a White House press conference brief.
Cyanne Loyle 38:00
I think that's absolutely right, Chris. And it's one of the things that I appreciate from Joy and Mollie's discussion was what was these these core values that journalists hold. So the importance of shedding light on areas of either behavior or political decisions or just places that we may not have the time or inclination to gather information on. Right, putting that information together and yeah, and seeking out truth. I'm trying not to use the word truth, right? Because I have a complicated relationship with thinking through that as a concept. But right, the information that we need to make these decisions and just feeling that to be a personal calling, and yeah, and it's one of the things I appreciate so much about trusting news is their ability to take those those impulses and that professionalism and try to make it even better.
Chris Beem 38:24
The other thing is that it's it is the first draft of history, and these people have to dive into something, learn it, figure out, try to decide what exactly is going on, then go back and write about it in a span of hours, right? And for us as academics, we take our sweet time with and read and reread and go back and talk to our colleagues or draft things. And anyway, they just don't have that luxury. And I remember when I was in graduate school, I I read this journalist report on what Wittgenstein had to say, what his point of view was, and I said to this journalist friend, a friend of mine, I said I was just really impressed that this person was able to do that because I think most philosophers couldn't, and he said this is really good to you, but I do think it is an incredibly special and unique skill to be able to do what they do. And I'm turning this into a oh we're turning this into a praise for journalism. But I do think they are wholly and completely unappreciated, not just for their role in the democracy, but also for just how hard it is to do what they do.
Cyanne Loyle 39:51
Yeah, and I think it's one of the things that I appreciated from the interview is that I think that we can nuance some of this discussion around journalism. So this idea that journalists are biased, or even that journalists hold values that diverge from the public, I think Joy and Mollie are really clear. That is often the case, right?
Chris Beem 40:10
Yes, they give empirical data to show that it's the case.
Cyanne Loyle 40:13
Yeah, but that doesn't actually have anything to ness. That doesn't mean that there's actual bias intent, right? So that you can hold values, and if you're professional in your reporting, those values or those biases should not systematically leak into your reporting, right? And so they don't have to be the same thing. But one of the things I wanted to highlight, I really was struck by this idea that that bias and kind of intentional bias is different from who feels seen and understood by certain coverage.
Cyanne Loyle 40:47
And I think that's an important distinction too. So bias says to me you are intentionally not reporting on things that don't support your own viewpoint, right? Whereas who feels seen and understood is something a little bit more nuanced than that, right? It's whether or not the stories represent your viewpoint or who's being talked to, and that's where the story from the interview about this idea that we went out and tried to talk to everybody who voted in the most recent election, but only 10% of the people would talk to us. That was an important point for me too to reflect on because I know this from empirical social science research that you always get it's more common to get these kind of these deviations of people who are willing to talk to you or present data, and that those are the things you've got to be on the lookout for. It makes a ton of sense that people that are really mobilized in a partisan perspective or one polar opposite of a viewpoint are the ones that want to share that viewpoint more.
Chris Beem 41:45
And so, how do you get past that? Right, and it's a it's an uphill battle. The resources that trusting news brings to this fight versus the resources and the polling pulpit of the most powerful person in the world. That's not symmetrical, right? But it is. It is what journalists can do with the resources they have and with the role they play to respond and try to improve this this world in which we're in, and God bless them. We're better off because they're doing it, right?
Cyanne Loyle 42:26
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that I appreciated both from the Brown lecture and then now from from the interview that Jenna did was that trusting news has a has some solutions, right? So it's definitely an organization that has thought through this problem and has, I mean, least steps forward, right? This idea of that people want to hear more stories about what, how things are, what things are working, right? Which is is distinct from like positive stories because I was mentioning it in the beginning. But I often when people say like you need to report on more positive things, I think about you know like the dog swimming competition in the pool at Welsh Pool here in State College, right? Or or the pepper eat or the pumpkin carving contest or whatever. We apparently have a very robust pumpkin launching competition with a couple people, right? But but that's not what Trusting News is talking about, right? They're talking about stories of things that are working, right? So instead of partisan divides making, you know, legislating completely impossible because of all these stalemates, right? These these stories of successes and collaborations and compromise and and and overlapping viewpoints, right? That that make that make governing possible. So what is working? And then the other thing I appreciated was this this incentive to really bring to light some of the processes behind reporting. So you know who are you talking to? How did you find those people as a journalist? Really being able to kind of lay the process bare a little bit more. I think there's more in the book than there is in in the discussion about what that actually looks like.
Chris Beem 44:06
Yeah, and the chapters in the book, every one of them has example, not just this is something that could be done. It's that it's here are some people who are doing this. Check it out and see if you can do the same or if it appeals to anyone.
Cyanne Loyle 44:19
Yeah, and even in the Brown Lecture, they had so many different organizations that I hadn't even heard about in terms of different content providers and news sources, and yeah, it gave me a lot to look up and ways to to consume my news a little bit differently. And I appreciated that.
Chris Beem 44:35
Yeah, it got raves. It's certainly worth your time if this is something that you are interested in or concerned about, and if you want to support them or local journalism, that wouldn't be a bad democratic thing to do either.
Chris Beem 44:51
So I think that's a wrap for Democracy Works. I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle 44:56
I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Chris Beem 44:58
Thanks for listening.