Study: Readers' attitudes about news media driven by moral values; suggests ways to better connect with audiences

Media Insight Project graph

A major study by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, opens up a new way of looking at the issue of media trust and may offer new avenues to address it," API reports. "The study finds that not all Americans universally embrace many of the core values that guide journalistic inquiry. And uneasiness with these core values of journalism is more connected to people’s underlying moral instincts than to politics. When journalists say they are just doing their jobs, in other words, the problem is many people harbor doubts about what the job should be."

The study tested public sentiment about five core journalistic values:

• Oversight: How strongly a person feels there is a need to monitor people in power and know what public officials are saying and doing. The flip side of this value is concern about intrusiveness or oversight becoming a hindrance or placing too much importance on insignificant events.
• Transparency: The idea that transparency is usually the best cure for what's wrong in the world, and that on balance it's usually better for things to be public than for things to be kept secret. The flip side is that sometimes the need to keep things secret is more important than the public's right to know, and the notion that most problems can be solved without embarrassing facts being aired publicly.
• Factualism: This value measures whether on balance more facts are always better and facts are the key to knowing what is true. The flip side is that the truth is more than just a matter of adding facts and that this emphasis on factualism can mask bias.
• Giving voice to the less powerful: This value measures whether people want to amplify the voices of people who aren’t ordinarily heard and if a society should be judged on how it treats the least fortunate. The inverse instinct is that inequalities will always exist and favoring the least fortunate does not always help them.
• Social criticism: This value measures how important people think it is to put a spotlight on a community’s problems in order to solve them. The flip side puts more emphasis on the value of celebrating things that are going right or working well in order to reinforce them and encourage more of them.

Only 11 percent of those surveyed embrace all five principles and they're mostly liberal. But the widespread distrust goes beyond partisanship. Some groups that tend to be liberal (Democrats, women, or people of color) are skeptical about some core journalism values, while some values resonate with conservatives.

"How people view those core values of journalism, moreover, is closely associated with deeper feelings they have about what moral values are important generally," API reports. "People who put more emphasis on the moral values of loyalty and authority, for example, tend to be more skeptical of some of the core values journalists try to uphold, or at least worry that these values could be taken too far. People who put more emphasis, by contrast, on the moral values of fairness for all and caring for the less fortunate tend to be more aligned with core press values. These differences persist even when we control for a person’s political partisanship and ideology."

Only two in 10 people they surveyed strongly support core journalism principles, which "suggests that some of the traditional framing journalists bring to stories, and many of the traditional marketing appeals journalism organizations use that trumpet traditional journalism values, will only reach so far in rebuilding trust or winning new subscribers," API reports. "If stories are rewritten to broaden their moral appeal, they become more interesting to people in all groups—both those more trusting of media and those more skeptical."

Messaging to reflect readers' core values can help bring in more subscribers, the study found. "To woo subscribers, the media will need to vary its messaging beyond traditional appeals about journalism being a watchdog. The survey also tested different messages asking respondents to financially support a local news organization," API reports. "The findings suggest people’s moral leanings definitely influence what kind of messaging about journalism they find appealing. People who most emphasize care or fairness, for instance, were more motivated by a message that highlighted the outlet’s commitment to protecting the most vulnerable through their news coverage. People who emphasized authority and loyalty preferred a message about the outlet’s long-term service to the local community.