A study on the existence of a relationship between the introduction of new media forms and values of trust in the news

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The Credibility of Multimedia News

A study on the existence of a relationship between the introduction of new media forms and values of trust in the news

MA Thesis – Master Journalistiek Pim Lindeman

Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Faculty of Arts Student number: 1625918

First reader: Dr. C.J. (Chris) Peters

Second reader: Prof. Dr. H.B.M. (Huub) Wijfjes Date: August 8, 2013

Abstract:

A lot of time and effort is put into studies on trust in the news media. Another important strand of research investigates the implications of the introduction of

new media forms. This study links the two fields together and focuses on the development of trust and credibility feelings on the side of the news consumer,

who is confronted with a rapidly changing news landscape. Its theoretical framework interrogates such topics as ‘trust’ and ‘credibility’, while at the same

time the background and possible effects of new media forms on consumers is portrayed. Empirical insight into these interactions is gained through a dozen of interviews with respondents from a younger (age 16-18) and an older (aged 44-52) population group, consisting of children and their parents. These findings provide a practical insight in the effects of consumption patterns and stereotypical beliefs on the trust in news media. Subsequently, the intergenerational family aspect is an

interesting factor. The study proves that both age groups believe technological developments affect the credibility of contemporary news media. However, the

consumption patterns do not correspond to these beliefs.

Keywords: Trust, credibility, journalism, news media, audience research, medium

theory, new media, social media

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LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE NAME AND CONTENT PAGE

Table 5.1: Percentages of respondents using a certain technology for news consumption 50 Table 5.2: Classification of respondents’ choice of most important news source 51 Table 5.3: Ideas of respondents about which group knows more about the news 51

Table 5.4: Occurrence of interaction with news 52

Table 5.5: Opinions on the usefulness of new possibilities for interaction with news media 53

Table 5.6: Respondents’ opinions on citizen journalism 53

Table 5.7: Percentages of respondents doubting the credibility of news media 54 Table 5.8: Respondents’ view on which news technologies are most trustworthy 55 Table 5.9: Respondents’ opinion on the contribution of online media to news credibility 56

LIST OF APPENDICES

APPENDIX NUMBER AND CONTENT PAGE

Appendix 1: Interview guide (both original Dutch as translated English versions) 82

Appendix 2: List of respondents 85

Appendix 3: Interview transcription 86

Appendix 4: Coding categories 89

Appendix 5: Example of coding stages 91

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INTRODUCTION

One of the most important factors in being able to live a social life in an environment with other individuals, either for private or professional intentions, is to have a sufficient amount of knowledge available. This information can be used to communicate with others, make decisions on important matters or to create a certain view through which one sees the world around him. This information can be obtained from multiple sources, ranging from personal interaction to history books and political pamphlets. However, one of the most important of this wide range of sources is the news, as brought into the world by news media. This is because they provide people with up to date

information on a wide range of topics. By doing so, the consumers do not only increase their knowledge, but are also provided with a context for their own lives and topics for social interaction with other people.

Within the information spread by news media a lot of subdivisions can be made in terms of genres: news about the latest election polls, football scores, as well as disasters and miracles happening all around the world can be found within most news products as distributed by news media. These news outlets, obviously, aim for reaching an as large as possible audience through which they can generate sales, financial income and a positive reputation.

Even through these intentions have been the same for decades, news channels have undergone enormous developments in terms of, for example style and publication rhythm. For example, centuries ago newspapers were used to print and publish their news only once a week and have changed these schedules to become daily outlets of news. Throughout all of these

developments a set of underlying journalistic values has created a bond between the journalists who reported the news and their audiences who consumed it. Values like accuracy, relevance and

objectivity have created this bond which, in the end, often comes down to one important element:

do audience members believe they can trust a news outlet? On the other hand, these values help to define and justify the professional image of an individual journalist or news outlet, or the news landscape in general.

Another elemental aspect in both the relationship between media and their audiences and

the changes media have undergone are the technological developments that took place during the

last couple of decennia. This development, in short, have changed media from scheduled bringers of

news stories into 24/7 interactive news outlets. Only twenty years ago who would have thought, for

example, that it would be possible to follow live video coverage of a natural disaster or a sports

match on a device through which the users could communicate with his fellow viewers, invite peers

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- 5 - to watch along, and get into direct contact with main characters from the news event through short message services and social networks? And all at the same time!

It is the combination of these two crucial elements of the relationship between news media and their audiences, ‘trust’ and ‘technological development’, that is the main topic of this research.

This is interesting to focus on because, even though the two separate elements have been the subject to much academic researches, they cannot be seen unattached from each other. For

example, if a decade-long newspaper user, who has used the daily paper as his or her main source of news stories, is forced to use a tablet computer because the publisher of the newspaper decided his company could make more profit by publishing solely in digital form, how would he or she react to that in terms of trusting the medium? It could be that he or she will trust the new form similar as the old one because it comes from the same publisher. However, it could also be that the new form is trusted better or worse because of the (im)possibility to adapt to the new features of the medium, such as the option to react on news publications or constant live updating of stories. In short, every news consumer, consciously or unconsciously, has to make constant considerations of how to value individual media outlets in terms of, among other values, trust. At the same time the introduction, use and adaptation of (new) technologies play a role in the realization of these considerations on the level of the individual.

The research done for this study consists of a series of interviews focusing on, among other subjects, individuals’ media consumption patterns; the importance they ascribe to the credibility of news media; the way in which they trust individual media forms and news outlets; and their ideas on the development of the media landscape throughout their lives. By doing so, this research tries to give a complete answer to the main research topic of this study: Does the introduction and adaptation of new media forms have an effect on the feeling of trust and credibility of news consumers?

To make this discussion even more interesting, the research population consists of two

groups of news consumers with an, expectedly, totally different view on news media: children and

their parents. Their views on news media are expected to be different because both groups grew up

surrounded by different technologies that made/make it possible to consume the news. The parents

grew up in a world that had radio, newspapers and television as main sources of news, while their

children grew up surrounded by computer screens, mobile phones and the internet. All of these

differences are ingredients that can help not only in the search for a relationship between trust in

news media and the introduction of new technologies, but also in showing how this differs between

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- 6 - individuals growing up surrounded by different technologies but in the same familiar surroundings.

So also the intergenerational family influence on the ‘technology-trust’ relationship is considered.

To make this research as clear as possible, it will start with three chapters which give a theoretical overview of fields related to this study. The first chapter is a general outline of the

possibilities of audience research and how this form of research has been done over the last decades.

It shows that a lot more can be done than straightforward enquiries into who uses a medium, how much time is spent on media consumption or what the favourite genres of a particular group of respondents are. The second chapter focuses on the academic meaning of the term ‘trust’ and the impact of technological development on news users. It focuses on the basis of a trust relation between an individual and an institution - like a news outlet in the context of this research - how trust has developed as a tool in the academic world, and on how individuals make their choices of trusting something like a medium or not trusting it. The third chapter gives an overview of the history and possibilities of audience research, which this research is as well. Together, these three chapters form the theoretical foundation of the actual research, and will be used to contextualize the gathered data from the interviews in the concluding sections of this research.

After these theoretical outline, one chapter is dedicated to explaining and defending the chosen methodology. Pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses: every research method has them.

However, it is important to make sure that the research that is done – using interviews and extracted data sets – is valid in the first place, and proves a point in the second.

This point – in the form of a conclusion - is based upon the data that is discussed in the findings chapter. This chapter is separated into three segments, considering the extracted interview data in relationship to (i) respondent backgrounds and consumption patterns, (ii) the used

technologies and their consequences, and (iii) trust in the news media in general and in specific media forms. Chapters 5 and 6 place the findings into their specific contexts. For example: is there a relationship between the technologies that individuals use for their news consumption and the way in which they trust the news and specific media outlets? And, if yes, what is this relationship based upon? The answer to the first question might not be that surprising. The answer on the second question, however, shows that news consumption is not the only factor on which valuations of trust are based.

Before interviewing, data sets and outcomes can be discussed it is important to create a

place for this research within the academic world. To do so, the next chapter will show the current

conditions of the field of audience research, and search for a place within that field for this study.

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CHAPTER 1: TRUST AS A CONCEPT IN ACADEMIA

For several decades trust has been a widely discussed topic in many areas of the academic spectrum.

Not only in relationship to news (or other) media, but also in the fields of sociology, where trust is considered a prerequisite to the foundation of any form of human social organism (Eisenstadt &

Roniger, 1984), political science, in which researchers found that interpersonal trust and institutional trust can lead to an increase or decrease of civic engagement (Putnam, 1993), psychology, where psychologists have found that mistrust can lead to depression and anxiety (Mirkowsky & Ross, 1986), and social psychology, which, for example, relates trust to teamwork (Porter & Lilly, 1996).

The bottom line of all these studies and research is that trust can be found and has

consequences in almost every aspect of (human) social life. Within this, the media play an important role, e.g. because they supply their audiences with information that is used for social talk with friends, family and colleagues, making choices for political preferences, shaping opinions on social problems and other cultures. That is why Tsfati and Cappella (2003, pp. 505-506) state the

importance of the media by saying the following:

if trust in the therapist has an effect on the success of the therapeutic process (Johnson & Talitman, 1997) and trust in the nurse has implications for the well-being of the patient (Pask, 1995), if trust in the boss has various consequences for organizations (Hubbell & Medved, 2001, June), then why should we not study whether trust in the news media has implications for consumption of and response to news media.

This is what is extensively done by scholars in the field of media studies and political communication.

Some of them try to find out which type of medium or technology is trusted most by a particular group of people (Rimmer & Weaver, 1987), others examine if a specific type of content is considered, for example, credible (Johnson & Kaye, 1998). In short, trust research can be done in a lot of different ways, because scholars consider trust to be a crucial variable for media effects (Tsfati, 2003). This research approaches trust from the angle of relationships between news media and their audiences, as a foundation for the image of news media, and as a phenomenon that is in interplay with the technologies that are used by media to bring their information across.

Recent studies have tried to conceptualize trust into a workable concept that can be used by

all media scholars and thereby create the possibility of doing credible comparative analyses. This has

led to an agreement about a couple of characteristics of what trust it. First of all, one of the most

important scholars in this field, Kevin Barnhurst, declared that trust is subjective in character:

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To examine trust, research asks respondents to rate institutions of government and media, yielding averages and trends that seem alarming. But the surveys hide as much as they reveal. One underlying assumption disparages the character of trust, which is first an emotion, a subjective response to felt qualities, not an objective, quantifiable descriptor. The assumption contrasts reason and emotion, turning the emotional into something irrational. Making emotion the opposite of enlightened reason introduces a contradiction in the definition of the term trust. Despite being subjective, trust is not outside the realm of rationality. (Barnhurst, 2012, p. 211).

This difficult, by highly interesting, multipolar understanding of trust will be treated carefully in this research, in the belief that trust is an emotional value, but one that gets explained rationally when asked about. I attempt to tackle this discrepancy through semi-structured interviews with news consumers, which will be explained in the methods section.

Secondly, after acknowledging that trust is a subjective emotion or feeling, academics agree that wherever trust comes into play it has the form of a relationship between two actors that have their interests to defend: a trustor, which places trust, and a trustee, the actor that is being trusted.

Both sides are assumed to be “purposive, having the aim of satisfying their interests” (Coleman, 1990, p. 96). Within these relationships, as most scholars stress (e.g. Bradach & Eccles, 1989: Fenton, 2000), for “trust to be relevant there has to be some uncertainty on the side of the trustor” (Tsfati &

Cappella, 2003, p. 505). The trustor expects that his or her relationship with the trustee leads to gains, instead of losses. However, as Seligman (1997) notes, there is no empirical evidence for the trustor to base this expectation on, or to verify the intentions or character of the trustee. Because of the uncertainty implied in this situation, credibility is a central element in trust.

This element of credibility proves to be only a part of the complete working of trust and trust relations. This will be explained more elaborately in the next part on the foundations of trust. After that, this chapter will delve into questions such as ‘why do people trust the media’ and topics such as the decreasing trust in the media as is noticed over the past years.

FOUNDATIONS OF TRUST

As described, trust is a subjective feeling resulting in a relationship. The question that arises

then is: what is the crucial nature of trust in terms of this relationship? According to Kees Brants,

trust in media and journalists can be seen along three dimensions: reliability, responsiveness and

credibility.

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[Reliability is] related to journalistic integrity and whether we can believe in [journalists’] professional honesty. […] Responsiveness has to do with what the public is interested in, taking their agenda of urgency seriously, providing a platform for the expression and exchange of articulated wants, desires, protests (Brants, 2012, p. 18).

These concepts of reliability and responsiveness will be connected in this research through focusing on consumer preferences and the role technology plays in this. In other words, and in Brants’ terms, do people like what they see because of interest or because of technological aspects?

Lastly, in Brants story, the concept of credibility comes into play. Because of the uncertainty in the relationship between the trustor and the trustee, credibility is a central element in trust (Tsfati

& Cappella, 2003), and this is why the concept of credibility has been given a lot of attention by scholars, and deserves special attention. The concept of credibility has been researched from a number of different angles, of which two stick out: source credibility and medium credibility (Kiousis, 2001).

The earliest examples of source credibility research, done by the ‘Yale Group’ gathered around Carl Hovland, focused on how changes in source characteristics influenced people’s willingness to alter their attitudes toward certain topics (e.g. Hovland & Weiss, 1951; Kelman &

Hovland, 1953; Osgood, et al., 1957). A central conclusion in their work is that “the impact of a message probably depends also upon the particular publication or channel through which it is transmitted” (Hovland et al., 1953, as cited in Kiousis (2001). This idea has become even more interesting in this century, because of the rapidly increasing amount of news outlets publishing the same news stories. This is therefore also a central point of interest for this research, and is tested by combining news consumers’ preferences in terms of media outlets and ideas on credibility per technology.

This Yale Group defined credibility in terms of a speaker’s expertise and -trustworthiness.

“Expertise referred to a communicator’s qualifications or ability to know the truth about a topic,

whereas trustworthiness was conceptualized as perceptions of the communicator’s motivation to tell

the truth about a topic” (Metzger, et al., 2003, p. 297). Later on source credibility research focused

on identifying the factors that might influence source credibility perceptions. Wilson and Sherell

(1993), for example, found that source expertise is the strongest influence on persuasion, because it

is the most objectively measurable. The problem with most of these studies is that they focused on a

single speaking source in front of an audience, which is a fairly uncommon mode of communication

in the contemporary media landscape with all of its interactive and omnipresent news outlets. This

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- 10 - thesis, therefore, inverses this by focusing on all of the possible news outlets as used by the interview respondents and the differences between them.

Medium credibility, the other category of research, focused more on the channel through which content is delivered rather than the sender of that content (e.g. Abel & Wirth, 1977; Gantz, 1981; Newhagen & Nass, 1989). Despite their relative age, most of these studies’ outcomes are still useful in the current media environment and for contemporary studies. However, they focused mainly on differences between newspapers and television because other technologies were not yet available.

In short, medium credibility researchers found that there are two overarching factors affecting media credibility, namely technological features and structural features. On the technological level the visual nature of modern media contributes to their sense of authority,

because they can show their audiences what is happening (e.g. Carter & Greenberg, 1965; Gaziano &

McGrath, 1986). A second technological feature is that live and breaking reports are seen as more accurate because of a greater sense of authority (Chang & Lemert, 1968). On the structural level two features are found which might still be in play today: when people do not hear from the news what they want to hear, it is perceived as less credible (Stamm & Dube, 1994; Zanna & Vecchio, 1973).

Secondly, because TV was accountable to larger and more diverse audiences than newspapers, people believed it could not afford to be biased (e.g. Carter & Greenberg, 1965; Chang & Lemert, 1968). This, however, might have changed in the contemporary media landscape in which the increasing number of news outlets appears to have turned a single, uniform news audience into multiple niche audiences. The mass audience is only addressed by large national media which were already present in the times of the named studies.

Together, the elements of reliability, responsiveness and (medium or source) credibility form the foundation of an individual’s trust in the media. After this elucidation, another question comes up: why do people trust (news media)? This will be the topic of concern of the next section, which will do so by delving into the trustor-trustee relationship deeper.

WHY DO PEOPLE TRUST MEDIA?

Despite the fact that the abovementioned studies have all tried to explain the basis of

relationships of trust, it has proved hard for scholars to explain why people trust the media. Recently,

there were some scholars who addressed this topic, and who concluded there is a list of specific

reasons for trust in the media. These lists, however, are not similar in all studies.

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- 11 - Kohring and Matthes (2007) concluded in their study on trust in news media that when people trust media, they take a certain risk. This is because journalists select information over other information, making the people trust in their selection. Thereby, within this process, they say that trust is considered an “hierarchical factor” of second order, which includes the factors ‘trust in the selectivity of topics’, ‘trust in the selectivity of facts’, ‘trust in the accuracy of depictions’ and ‘trust in journalistic assessment.’ These four factors are of first order and together are the foundation of trust in the media.

By ‘trust in the selectivity of topics’ Kohring and Matthes mean that “the recipients trust that the news media will focus on those topics and events that are relevant to them” (2007, p. 239). ‘Trust in the selectivity of facts’ is about the media selecting the right facts and background information a person needs to understand a story as completely as possible. ‘Trust in the accuracy of depictions’

means that whenever something can be reported as right or wrong by a news medium, for example in case of murder or rape, the medium makes the right choice by framing a story towards the right side in the eyes of the audience. However, it should be noted that most of the stories cannot and should not be judged upon by the media because this can make them subjective or biased. Finally,

‘trust in journalistic assessment’ means that a journalist is able to fulfil his journalistic duty. Not only in terms of factuality as is described in the previous factors, but also in terms of structure, choice of words and so on.

It is obvious that all of these four elements carry in them a sort of hierarchical order between the media and their audiences. This is because in all instances the journalist (or the medium) makes the choices in which the audience has no more say than to consume and, perhaps even

unconsciously, choose to trust or distrust the journalists’ choice. This hierarchy is built upon the trustor and trustee-model as explained earlier in this chapter, because the audience puts their interests in the hands of the media and expect them to treat them wisely by choosing the most important topics and reporting factually. Only if all of these four elements are believed to be positively achieved by a certain medium, do Kohring and Matthes think a person will trust that medium. Following this line of thought, this research will, among other things, let its respondents answer interview questions that will be identified as any of these four factors in order to identify if there is any difference in trust between media technologies.

More recently Jackob, in his study on the associations between interpersonal, trust in the

media and trust in institutions in general, divided the causes for people’s trust in the media into two

categories: latent causes and manifest causes. “Manifest causes are those rather conscious causes

that people express when asked why they trust. Latent causes, on the other hand, are rather

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- 12 - unconscious causes that come into consideration as reasons for trust – it is not likely and not

necessary that people are aware that their trust is founded on them” (2012, p. 102).

Jackob comes up with a list of four manifest causes for trust in the media. At first, he describes a relationship between media use and trust in the media, which is “closely related and interdependent” (2012, p. 102). This argument is made in other recent academic studies (e.g. Tsfati &

Cappella, 2003; Tsfati & Peri, 2006). Second, individual need and orientation is a possible reason for trust. These statements are backed by empirical results from different studies (Tsfati & Cappella, 2003). Tsfati and Cappella’s (2003) study uses a survey which shows that media consumers use media to find information, instead of only receiving it, and that they serve as unique information sources that have to be used in order to find the information asked for by the consumer. However, results from another study show that this does not count for information found in entertaining or relaxing content, such as showbiz news and gossip. These entertainment media are not particularly trusted despite the great amount of attention they receive (Tsfati & Peri, 2006) Thirdly, Jackob states that

credibility research shows that there is a close relationship between individual impressions of the preferred media’s reliability and credibility on the one hand and trust in these media on the other.

Consequently, the image of certain media might have an influence on trust in these media as well as on trust in the media in general (2012, p. 103).

This is backed by an earlier study by Jackob that concluded that being confronted erroneous reports by the media can have a negative influence on trust in the media in general (2009). All of these claims (by both Jackob and Tsfati and Cappella) will also be of concern for this research by focusing on respondents’ preferred media types, time spent per media type and preferred story genres.

The other category of causes Jackob mentions are, as said, latent. The most important of

these causes, which has a long history in academia (e.g. Chaffee, et al., 1971; Rosengren & Windahl,

1989), is the social influence on media use. Media users are socially influenced at school, at home, by

friends, and by family, co-workers, and so on. Jackob uses the example of the daily newspaper: if

someone is used to having his parents reading a newspaper every day over a longer period of time, it

is likely to influence him to create a relationship with the media that is based upon credibility and

trust. This is what Jackob (2012, p. 103) refers to as “(media-)socialization”. The same applies to

aversions to certain media outlets: if someone gets along with people reacting negatively to a certain

media outlet, the person is likely to develop negative feelings toward this outlet himself. A second

latent cause of trust in media Jackob mentions can be ascribed to “subliminal trust motives”, which

emerges from the asymmetry of the relationship between the media and their recipients (Ball-

Rokeach, 1998 in Jackob 2012): because news consumers are mostly dependent on the media as

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- 13 - their source of information, it is conceivable that a person develops trust in the media because of the lack of other sources. This development works as a double-edged sword: if someone, for information needs, uses a certain medium because of the unavailability of other sources he or she is likely to trust the medium used. On the other hand, if someone has none access to the media (for instance because he is poor or old) this is believed to have a negative influence on his or her trust towards these media (Kenski & Stroud, 2006).

Together, Jackob believes these two categories of causes create general trust in the media as a societal subsystem, just like politics is one, for example. However, Jackob’s research, together with Kohring and Matthes’ work, should not be seen as finished pieces of work, because of the constantly changing media environment. For example, social surroundings influence attitudes towards the media, both in everyday use and in a formative way, but this has changed in the era of mobile communication and the internet. This is because these media types are consumed in private or privately in a public space. Thereby, the distinction between public and private has been

problematized. This is contrary to, for example, television or the radio (and newspapers to a lesser extent) which are consumed together or at the same time. This raises the group feeling among its audience and consequently the pressure to adjust to the preferences of the majority of the group.

For example, if someone is used to having a right-wing newspaper at home during his younger years, he or she is expected by his housemates (i.e. parents) to copy this behavior and also read that paper.

This is only a single example of how the media environment changes in a way that can influence the causes for trust in the media.

DECREASING TRUST

Now that the foundations of and the reasons for trust are treated, the final part of this chapter focuses on recent studies on the current state of trust in news media. These studies will be the most important sources of comparison for this research because of their similar character in terms of combining both trust and technology, just as is the purpose of this research.

Recent years have brought scholars to agree that the public has become increasingly critical towards the media. Tsfati and Cappella explain this by saying that the audience feels that

mainstream media are neither credible nor reliable, that journalists do not live by their professional standards, and that the news media get in the way of society rather than help society […], are not fair and objective in their reports, that they do not always tell the whole story, and that they would sacrifice accuracy and precision for personal and commercial gains (2003, p. 506).

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- 14 - That this development can be problematic for media in the first place (and, as a

consequence, for democracy in the second) is widely acknowledged. Therefore a lot of time and effort is put into searching for the background of this ‘critical turn.’ “If trust is ‘the cement and precondition of every relationship’ (Brants, 2012, p. 16),” Barnhurst states, “then perhaps cynicism is its opposite on a continuum.” (2012, p. 211). He elaborates on this because, according to him and many other scholars, cynicism is increasing among news media audiences. It is problematic, however, that these scholars tend to use multiple terms (like mistrust, cynicism, etc.) in research that

apparently overlap. Barnhurst states that cynicism and mistrust should be placed next to each other because they mean different things. “Mistrust is about uncertainty, a ‘lack of sureness,’ implying doubt that makes one unable to act ‘based upon suspicion’.” Cynicism, on the other hand, “implies either an attitude ‘contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives’ or ‘a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest” (Barnhurst, 2012, p. 212). Despite coming op with these cleat definitions Barnhurst concludes, in contrast to the more definite thought of Tsfati and Capella who use terms such as ‘credible’ and ‘reliable’ in the earlier quote, that it is not (yet) fair to generalize and call the public ‘mistrusting’ or ‘cynical’. Both parties do agree, however, that the tendency of the publics’ feelings has become more negative and gloomy towards the media in terms of trust and credibility.

However it is called, there therefore is a school of thought in academia that agrees on the tendency that the audience becomes more critical. Despite this consensus there is disagreement over where this criticism comes from, resulting in two camps of scholars. The first, which stems from the US in particular, believes in the ‘spiral of cynicism,’ as it was first introduced by Cappella and Jamieson (1997). This spiral is believed to breed cynicism among the public because of the press criticism of political officials, which can be found in examples of strategic and conflict framing. In short this means that there is a relationship between trust in politics and trust in media, and this relationship is negatively affected by mutual distrust of politicians and journalists. This line of thought received a lot of criticism itself, mostly originating in Europe, because scholars believed there is too little evidence for this spiral (De Vreese, 2005; Poletti & Brants, 2010).

Despite the disagreement over the background of the critical audience in terms of the relationship between politicians and journalists, there are a number of interrelated developments which have influenced most Western countries over the last couple of years, and it are these developments that have put the trust in Western media to the test (Brants, 2012, pp. 18-20).

At first, the media market has changed. The number of media outlets has increased (not in

the last place by the introduction of the internet), and advertising revenues for all media have

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- 15 - declined which has increased the commercial pressure on the media. This change in the market has led to a shift from a supply to a demand market in communication (Cuilenburg, et al., 1999 in Brants, 2012). “It is no longer the producer of news who decides exclusively what the public should

consume. […] Rather, the assumed demands of the public have become more decisive for what the media provide” (Brants, 2012, p. 18). This development is particularly interesting for this research because it focuses on the interplay between decreasing trust and the introduction of new

technologies. The research will therefore test news consumers’ appreciation of new ways in which interaction between media and their audiences can take place.

Secondly, as a consequence, Brants notes that journalism has changed. There is more focus on sensational news, failing politicians or drama, conflict and scandals. Besides this change in content, form and style of journalism has changed as well into more popular forms. Thirdly,

technological developments such as the internet and mobile devices have undergone an enormous increase in popularity. This has led to new opportunities for media and audiences which will be discussed in the next chapter of this study. In the fourth and final place, the public has changed its scope. This is what Manin (1997) meant with his audience democracy: personalities (like prime ministers or other politicians) have become more important than political parties, authenticity more than authority and polls more than party programs. It are these four developments that can be seen as the key components of this research. They will be combined and tested through a series of interview questions among a focus group divided in two age groups.

Now that the foundation of the trust relation between media and their audiences is made

clear, and the assumption that audiences have become more negative and skeptical in terms of trust

towards news media is backed with academic evidence, it is time to plunge into the academic field of

technology-journalism relationships and the impact they have on the news audiences.

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CHAPTER 2: TECHNOLOGY AND JOURNALISM

The discourse on journalism and the journalistic profession appears to be surprisingly stable on its purpose, not in the least because it is based upon norms and ethical principles like accuracy and objectivity. However, it proves to be an area that is subject to change because of many factors. For example a change in the demand from audiences, who want their news to be offered to them faster and more accurately. Or the changing role of a professional journalist, who saw amateur colleagues enter their spectrum during the last decade. All of these challenges, or at least the vast majority of them, appear to come down to one overarching factor: changing technologies. And this has been so since the earliest days of journalism. Technologies changes the form in which people and media can communicate in relation to, for example, time and place. This communication not only takes place through human interaction, but also through interaction with media.

The first example of the development of this kind of interaction is the order to publish the Acta Diurna, a sort of message board carved in stone or metal concerning the important events of the day, by Julius Ceasar in 59 BC. This was followed by Gutenberg’s printing press, invented during the first half of the fifteenth century. This press did not only print bibles, it also formed the

foundation under mass literacy and the possibility to print actual newspapers which could be widely distributed. This printing procedure was supported by the quick communication method of the telephone, which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell during the 1870s, and the telex from the 1920s. During this twentieth century the introduction of digital communication methods, such as radio and television, took place. This resulted in the possibility of live news coverage and fast communication between journalists and their editors and thereby indirectly led to a change in the dynamics of professional journalism, which became even more hasty and 24/7 job than it already was. These developments are extended into the extreme by the introduction of the personal computer and the internet, technologies that make instant global communication possible from wherever a user is.

It is technological developments such as these which have received a lot of attention from

journalism and media scholars, simply because their influence is manifold. Not only do journalists

have more opportunities to check their information, contact their sources and publish their products,

there are negative consequences as well, such as less time to ‘check’ information and having to

compete with free online alternatives. Next to this, it is also the party on the other side of the

journalistic spectrum that gets affected by new technologies. On some facets, such as the possibility

to publish news, opinions or other texts, this has affected both parties (journalists and news

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- 17 - consumers). About the multitude of ways in which journalism is changed by technological

developments, John Pavlik made a list of four separate categories:

technological change affects: (1) the way journalists do their jobs; (2) the nature of news content; (3) the structure and organization of the newsroom and the news industry; and (4) the nature of the relationships between and among news organizations, journalists and their many publics […] (2000, p.

229).

Without neglecting the other three interesting developments, this research will focus on the fourth development in general, and on one aspects of it in particular: the nature of the trust-relationship between journalists and their many publics.

Besides having direct influences on the life and work of journalists, the changes for news consumers are at least as significant. Obviously, since the introduction of the internet it became possible for individuals to look up the latest news from anywhere around the globe (and beyond) whenever they wanted. This changed the notions of time and space in such a manner that they were no longer guiding. For example, people did no longer have to wait for 8p.m. every night for the news to be shown on television. For this research, this changing notion of time in relationship to the news is interesting in multiple ways: i.e. patterns of consumption have changed with the introduction of the internet, and a multitude of sources became available of which people had (and still have) to choose their favourites (which might have changed their feeling of trust towards news media).

Later, with the introduction of smartphones and tablets people gained access to the news wherever they were. Simultaneously, websites developed in such a way that they gave viewers the chance to respond to what was published on them, or create their own content on personal pages.

This meant that the relationship between media and the users of them changed again.

Lately, the contemporary media-landscape is influenced (if not to say reshaped) by social

media, such as Facebook or Twitter. These network-based communities allow its users to create their

own account through which they can share their daily activities, thoughts and beliefs with friends or

followers, but also share links to interesting news content, must-see websites and so on. This

development means that the relationship between journalism and its audience has changed once

again. No longer are audiences dependent of one-way communication methods like newspapers,

television or radio (which they can only consume but not react to). Nowadays consumers are part of

the network that is built by media, journalists and themselves, because they can interact, spread and

publish. Developments like this are interesting for this research because most of them, as described

earlier, lead to a more influential role for the audience, which might lead to changed power relations

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- 18 - between media and their audiences and subsequently have implications for audiences’ trust in news media. This new relationship will be discussed more extensively in the final part of this chapter.

Within the contemporary world, named a global village by the most elaborately discussed scholar in this chapter, the relationship between consumers and journalists (or journalism) has changed because of these new technologies and devices (McLuhan, 1964). Not only are newspapers increasingly using newsroom convergence and do the boundaries between print, broadcast and online media seem to blur, the age-old borderline between journalists and their audience is blurring as well (Jenkins, 2006), and this is the main idea of this chapter: it is no longer valid to make a simple and sharp distinction between journalists and their audiences and it is technologies that are

responsible for this development. This idea fits directly in the main idea of this thesis, that trust in journalism and the news is touched because of the rise of new technologies and their possibilities.

MEDIUM THEORY

Despite having obvious and direct impact on their users, new technologies that produce, publish and distribute news also carry with them characteristics that have substantial effects on the world in which they are used, but that are unnoticed or subconsciously encountered. To put this into more theoretical words, a medium has content of itself apart from what a journalist tries to tell with it. On this subject the deterministic scholar Marshall McLuhan is the most important sage, having influenced medium theory, a name invented by fellow scholar Joshua Meyrowitz in his 1985 book No Sense of Place, despite conversation being prominent in the decades since the 1960s. McLuhan is a technological determinist because he believed that technologies shaped (and still shape) mankind, instead of mankind dominating the technologies they invented. He was criticized for this as well, for instance by Raymond Williams:

The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory […] It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism […] If the medium - whether print or television – is the cause, of all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history is at once reduced to effects.

(1990, 126-127)

McLuhan’s work, often called in the same breath with Harold Adam Innis whose work

predates McLuhan, in turn influenced Postman’s (1970) idea of media ecology, which centers on the

principle that technology controls all walks of life, instead of only influencing society.

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- 19 - McLuhan’s and other media ecologists’ focus on the intrinsic impact of technologies comes from the central point of interest in their studies: the implications of (new) technologies on the social and everyday life of people. McLuhan started his most significant work Understanding Media with:

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message” (2006, p. 7). With this he means to say that any newly introduced technology has

influences in its users’ personal and social life. He clarified this idea with his famous example of electric light. In itself, electric light may appear to have no intrinsic content, in terms of a newspaper containing stories or a DVD-disk carrying a movie. However, as is McLuhan’s idea, it is only a medium without a message (content) as long as it is not used to do something with.

Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the medium is the message’

because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action (2006, pp. 8-9).

This quote also directly relates to the deterministic side of McLuhan’s views: if, in the example, electrical light is substituted with paper (as the actual fiber) and brain surgery or night baseball with newspapers, the deterministic features of the media become clear, because newspapers cannot exist without paper and thereby it is the medium (paper) that controls the scale of human association and action. However, McLuhan thinks that people are unaware of this. This is because people only focus on what they believe is the content of a medium: the news story inside a newspaper, the characters and storyline of a movie or the plot of a novel, for example. This blindness relates to what McLuhan calls the subliminal effects of media. “The fish is unaware of the water in which it swims. It is blind to its environment – its medium. We too function and perceive reality in an

information/communication environment, which we take for granted” (Logan, 2010, p. 355). This

idea, which is the most important idea in this field of study, implicates that people slowly become

servants of the technologies they use instead of the other way around, which would be the expected

power relationship between people and the products they create. “To behold, use or perceive any

extension of ourselves in technological forms is necessarily to embrace it. By continuously embracing

technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 46). Logan

(2010), while trying to explain McLuhan’s legacy, explains this phenomenon in a clear manner: “At

first, technology serves as an extension of humankind, but after awhile a subliminal flip takes place

and suddenly the users are transformed into an extension of the technology they have come to

consider part of them” (p. 356). Again, this means people become the servants of the technologies

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- 20 - they use. This notion is relevant for this research because it is the contemporary news landscape, with its diverse range of technologies, in which people are surrounded by technologies in their everyday lives, and it is interesting to make a group of respondents think about what they actually consume and how they value it in terms of trust, technological preferences and everyday life use.

It isn’t only individuals that are touched and changed by the technologies they use. Media ecologists believe that media, because of the content they carry with them as described above, create new social patterns and restructure perceptions. For example, the notion of time has altered nowadays in comparison to the times in which the internet and mobile media were unavailable in a sense that the world appears to be ‘faster’ now since media and news stories are published 24/7. By doing so news media shape and change the social entities in which they are used, such as

international stock market trade, for example. Immediate information on the economic status of a country or corporation give traders more options to react on the stock market. Knowledge of the dominant media and technologies of a culture determine “the cause and shaping force of the entire structure [and] what the pattern of any culture [has] to be, both physically and socially” (McLuhan, 1972, p. XII). Thereby media not only have an impact on social patterns but also directly affect the way people think and use media. For example, if someone watches the morning news every day before he or she goes to work this will become part of the daily routine. In this development, the users will subconsciously create values of e.g. trust and preference of technologies and it are these values which are the main point of interest of this study.

Despite all the positive attention and the iconic image of himself as a person, Marshall McLuhan did also receive a lot of criticism on his work. First of all, McLuhan’s work was criticized for its deterministic character, at first by Raymond Williams and James Carey. They famously placed McLuhan in the category of hard determinists. Hard determinists believe that technologies, even though they are developed by man, develop independent from social concerns. This means that technologies create the boundaries in which a society can operate. About this, Williams wrote that

the work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory […] It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism […] If the medium - whether print or television – is the cause, of all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history is at once reduced to effects.

(Williams, 1990, pp. 126-127)

But there were more scholars who shared this critical view. Brian Winston, for example, wrote a

book with the provocative title Misunderstanding Media in 1986, in which he started his criticism on

technological determinism. It was not until 1995, however, until he published his most famous

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- 21 - example questioning McLuhan’s determinism: If the medium truly is the message, how does one account (for example) for racial biases in color film (the first forms of which captured the tones of white skin much better than those of black skin)? McLuhan’s followers dodged this critique by claiming that asking a question like this was taking McLuhan too literal. The author himself would probably have a more metaphorical interpretation, they believed. This directly leads to the second line of critique on McLuhan.

This second line of criticism focuses on the style in which McLuhan wrote his works. It was, for example, social critic and philosopher Dwight Macdonald who criticized McLuhan’s

Understanding Media for being prosaic. In short, he believed that the book was too excessive, and that a journal article could have brought the same message across. He stated that the more one would read the book, the more one would find out it is ridden with “contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness”

(Macdonald, 1969, p. 32). It should be noted, however, that McLuhan did address the postmodern reader, which was a sophisticated style at the time that might have needed a little more time to get adapted by readers schooled in more linear styles. Another line of critique came out of a more practical problem: McLuhan’s ideas were believed to be too abstract to be tested by proper

investigative procedures. Meyrowitz, in a less judgmental way than Macdonald did, explained this by saying that “McLuhan’s ‘findings’ are in an unusual form and they are, therefore, not easily

integrated into other theoretical research frames. [His] observations have a direct, declaratory, and conclusive tone that makes them easy to accept fully or reject fully, but difficult to apply or explore”

(Meyrowitz, 1985, p. 21). However, a lot of McLuhan’s critics knew that it was not his purpose to produce scientific knowledge. “Criticizing McLuhan for not demonstrating enough empirical evidence for his theories is akin to criticizing van Gogh for not carrying out proper meteorological research before painting a sky”, Megan Mullen wrote strikingly about this matter (2006, p. online). It is because of this contextualization that McLuhan’s ideas, after a view decades of little attention, still prove interesting and useful for research such as this one. Why and how will be shown in the final part of this chapter when individual new media forms are discussed.

Despite the criticism, with the turn of the 21

^st

century McLuhan’s ideas become popular once

more. This was because they appeared to fit into the technological landscape of the time, with its

online developments. Therefore McLuhan’s ideas on patterns of introduction, deterministic roles of

new media and the changing roles for audiences and news media, as described are the main themes

in the rest of this chapter. It will start by discussing multiple media forms that are both exemplary

and significant in this process. Afterwards the new roles of both audiences and journalists will be the

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- 22 - main point of interest. Together with the previous theory chapter on trust relations this chapter lays the theoretical foundation for this research.

IMPACT OF NEW MEDIA ON USERS

Even though McLuhan reached his theoretical pinnacle almost fifty years ago, this part of the research will show that the basic ideas of his work (as shown in the previous section) are still

applicable nowadays, even to the latest of media technologies such as the internet, social networks and tablet computers. These technologies, and the devices that they have introduced, all have their very own intrinsic characteristics in terms of i.e. their positions in time and space,

interconnectedness to other technologies and personalization. These characteristics have ultimately led to the main topic of concern of this chapter: the fading division between news producers and news consumers. This process, however, has witnessed the introduction of multiple new media forms, which will all be separately discussed in the upcoming sections.

The first technology, which introduction can be seen as the borderline between the eras of old and new media, that deserves attention is the internet. The internet is so significant in the history of technological developments because it can be seen as a development that puts medium theory in a complete new perspective. Before the Web, as McLuhan explained, the content of a new medium is always a previous medium, or, in other words “the content of any medium is none other than a prior medium, tamed from its former wild, invisible state, and brought to lie now on your carpet in full view” (Levinson, 1999, p. 37). In this sense, the content of a movie is a novel.

The Web, however, is multiple previous technologies combined into one gateway. “The Web has taken as its content the written word in forms ranging from love letters to newspapers, plus telephone [through Skype, ed.], radio [through live streams, ed.], and moving images with sound which can be considered a version of television” (Levinson, 1999, pp. 37-38). Through this

combination of multiple previously known technologies users encountered a high-tech experience with a two-way stream of communication, which was known only from private conversations through spoken word and the telephone, but not through the use of a journalistic medium. This strongly relates to the idea of ‘remediation’, as brought up by Bolter and Grusin (2000). They see it as a defining characteristic of these new media forms that they carry within them the representations of other (mostly older) media forms. Beforehand people were used to only read a newspaper, watch TV or listen to the radio but with the internet a complete new pattern of use came into existence.

The internet offers information that is always available in terms of time, because it can be addressed

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- 23 - whenever is liked, in contrast to television or radio news, which has to be used when broadcasted.

Second, internet raised ‘interaction’ to a new level: i.e. users could react to news stories, read instant updates with the latest news or could enjoy its multimediality with video, audio and text. The impact of these changes is, according to medium theory, most visible at the introduction of the technology, because when it matures, it becomes invisible through its integration within everyday life (McLuhan, 1964). At that time, new media formats already came up, such as blogging, social networks and mobile devices.

BLOGGING

A blog, or weblog, in our context is an (often personal) webpage that contains content produced by anyone who wants to have their voice heard on the internet. This can be both

professional journalists of so-called mainstream media and amateur ones. This directly leads to the first interesting development that came with the introduction of blogs: news media no longer had the exclusive possibility to publish information on a mass scale.

In a sense, this possibility to publish links to Benjamin’s (Benjamin, 1969, p. 232) idea, which came as a reaction to McLuhan on photocopying, which would turn a reader into a writer:

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press ... an increasing number of readers became writers.... And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports.... Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its character.... At any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Logan contextualized this idea into a contemporary one by saying that “one can say that the internet and blogs makes everyone a journalist […] and furthermore, a journalist who can compete with large circulation national newspapers because of the global reach of the internet” (Logan, 2010, p. 280).

This is because everyone can publish his or her own stories through his or her own channel, namely the weblog, by which there is no intervention of mainstream media who, because of these

developments, have to compete with rivals from an unexpected area: their own audiences.

This directly relates to the, already mentioned briefly, most relevant social consequence of

the rise of blogging in the context of this research: mainstream media no longer have a monopoly in

spreading information, and thereby in creating opinion. The fact that small groups of media owners

are no longer able to control the flow of information might therefore be celebrated, and blogging

played (and still plays) a substantial role in this process. However, there are a couple of side-effects

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- 24 - to this development. One the one hand, amateur journalists are not trained to filter information to protect objectivity (the so-called watchdog role of the media). This can lead to an increase in the publication on unchecked, one-sided information. On the other hand, amateur or corporate blogs can be (and increasingly tend to be) used for promotional purposes. If, for example a Member of Parliament sets up his own blog on which she communicates with voters, this can be seen as an ideal example of direct representation. However, this bypassing of traditional media can again lead to confronting the audience with biased and subjective information, which can harm democracy.

It are these two possible consequences of blogging which are of particular importance to this research because they both come from a technological development and can both have influence on the way in which users value their trust in news media. One the one hand because publishing

unchecked information may lead to incomplete or faulty stories in the media, this may in turn harm users’ trust values. On the other hand because offering an alternative to mainstream media may increase the completeness of a story and increase these same levels. This will be topic of concern in the findings of this research.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

After blogs a new online technology came up and became extremely popular (and still is).These recent developments in the media landscape are social networks, or social media. These networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow people to share their daily activities and thoughts through short messages, hyperlinks and pictures. In this sense, the social networks can be seen as microblogs in relation to ‘regular’ blogs as discussed earlier. The forms of content users produce are shared by selected groups of other social media users (friends in case of Facebook, followers on Twitter). Despite this, most messages published on these social networks are also shown publicly. In this sense it extends the development of the decreasing division between audiences and media, which was already started by the internet and further developed. For example, it has become possible to get into direct contact with journalists to question the validity of their products.

If we use McLuhan’s arguments on these social networks, they change their users not only

because the content they produce is new, but because of its new mode of communication. For

example, the length of Twitter messages (tweets) is limited to 140 characters. This means that users

have to be briefer in their messages, which changes the sort of language they use. So on the one

hand a Twitter user can do everything a blog user can, but “it is precisely this limiting factor that

made Twitter more nimble and ‘real-time’” (Pan & Crotts, 2012, p. 80). Apart from this the content

produced by social media is more real-time than ever experienced before, further changing the

already altered notions of time and space. For example, the software of both Facebook and Twitter is

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- 25 - programmed in such a way that users run into the most actual messages first, all day long, unlike newspapers which have no chronological order in their publications other than that most news is from the day before publication. Furthermore it makes no differences between the location from where a message is sent, like a newspaper that divides stories between separate sections.

Two criticisms can be thought of when analyzing the use of social networks (and blogs as well). At first, some users see these media as a substitute of a ‘real’ life off-line. “In fact some people are so hooked on interacting with people they have never met face-to-face on social networks that they prefer this activity to interacting with the people they actually know” (Logan, 2010, p. 283). The second argument against the extensive use of social media is that some users have no sense of privacy any longer, and that they publish private information on their webpages, which can harm them in their off-line daily activities. Like Narcissus (which McLuhan used as an example of this phenomenon), they can become paralyzed by their reflection in the mirror, which in this case is their Facebook or Twitter account, obviously (McLuhan, 1964, p. 41). These developments can have their impact on the distinction users make between mainstream media, which have dominated the news landscape for decades, and alternative media. This can subsequently have impact on topics as focused on in this research, such as consumption patterns and variation in trust levels between media forms.

SMARTPHONES AND TABLET COMPUTERS

Where both blogs and social networks are examples of media within the digital environment of the internet, there is also a recent technology that changes the social life of its users because of a new form of hardware, a new apparatus. These are smartphones and tablet computers, which allow their users to make use of most abilities for which they needed a desktop computer until recently (sending emails, using social networks, surfing the internet, etc.), within the palm of their hands.

The consequences of these technologies lay in their omnipresence in the life if their users.

For example: they can function as an alarm clock to wake someone up, a GPS-system to guide him or

her to a meeting, a news medium on which both newspapers can be read and television newscasts

can be watched, and a communication device with which he or she can communicate with anyone

through a wide range of channels varying from email to social media and internet pages. As a social

consequence of this omnipresence of communication devices in our daily lives, we can say that

nowadays we live in a global village in which “everybody lives in the utmost proximity created by our

electric involvement in one another’s lives (McLuhan, 1964, p. 35), and it is electronic involvement of

which this research tries to grasp the consequences in terms of trust in news media.

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- 26 - One important characteristic of smart phones and tablet computers, as well as most of the other new media as discussed in this chapter, is that they increase the possibilities for their users to interact with, among others, news items, other users and news producers. For example, users can comment on news items from wherever they are or help journalists by uploading video material that completes their stories. Because this characteristic plays an essential part in the everyday use of these media, it receives special attention in the upcoming section as well as in the findings and discussion parts of this research.

THE CHANGING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONSUMERS AND JOURNALISM: INTERACTION

As noted briefly in the previous sections, it is within this global village where the relationship between consumers and journalists (or journalism) has changed because of these new technologies and devices. Not only are newspapers increasingly using newsroom convergence and do the

boundaries between print, broadcast and online media seem to blur, the age-old borderline between journalists and their audience is blurring as well (Jenkins, 2006).

This idea connects to the earlier mentioned deterministic views of McLuhan: the age of internet and other digital communication methods can be seen as the culmination point of a

decades-old statement, namely that the role of the audience has changed from being only a user into one of being user and content at the same time (McLuhan & Nevitt, 1972, p. 231), meaning that people should contextualize and interpret whatever information they receive, and placing it within their own environment. In this sense, a news story is unique to every consumer. For example,

McLuhan observed that whenever someone is talking on the phone or on air, the sender is sent. “The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electronic information,” he said in a New York Magazine essay in 1978.

The internet, which is a clear example of the earlier explained idea of the infiltration cycle of new technologies (that is based upon older technologies) by combining the characteristics of previously dominant media types such as television and print, can be seen as a further developed form of this idea. It is “encompassing all three levels of human determination of content” (Levinson, 1999, p. 40):

McLuhan’s notion of the user as content admits to at least a three part hierarchy in which (a) humans serve as (determine) the content of all media by virtue of our inextricable interpretation of all that comes before us, (b) the human perceiver travels “through” one-way electronic media such as radio and television, and therein

A study on the existence of a relationship between the introduction of new media forms and values of trust in the news

The Credibility of Multimedia News