Ritual Reinforcement: Habit, Emotion, and Identity as Attributes of Trust in News

Abstract

Theory and research about trust in news typically draws on normative understandings of news as a conduit for information transmission in the service of the media’s role as the Fourth Estate in democratic systems. These approaches rely on a narrow top-down view of trust, and of how and why people use news in their daily lives. In this study, we offer a complementary audience-centric view of trust in news, which foregrounds three attributes beyond politics and professional practice, closer to Carey’s formulation of communication as ritual, which we argue is better aligned with how much of the public engages with news. Our qualitative analysis of focus groups and interviews in Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States identifies three attributes of trust in news that extend beyond the transmission view of communication—specifically those pertaining to habit, emotion, and identity. These findings show the importance of considering how trust operates through sociocultural levels sometimes in tandem with, but in other ways orthogonal to, political factors. We posit that journalists and reformer-advocates for journalism seeking effective strategies for rebuilding trust may need to look beyond politics and the professional practices in the industry to do so.