Trust in news media: the naïve perception of the causes is dominated by the…

Abstract

In the last twenty years trust in traditional news media has been declining all over the world, but there are few countries where the fall has been as dramatic as in Lithuania. While in the early 2000s the Lithuanian legacy media top-ranked any public trust survey, today their reputation as a reliable source of news could hardly be worse. Researchers from a number of EU countries have studied this process in general, yet none of their explanations seems to fit the Lithuanian realities. In Lithuania the trust deficit may be the result of changes, especially in the news production format, from a fairly orderly, 'objective' narratives to a fast-paced hodgepodge of scenes and multiple voices, i.e. a format which prioritizes immediacy and sensationalism (especially in 24-hour news channels). It is this shift that may have precipitated the collapse in trust in news media, and yet it has never been properly investigated. To get a better understanding of the problem, we examined the views of the general public collected in a recent survey and matched them with the views sampled from a series of structured interviews with the publishers, editors and journalists of local weekly newspapers. The latter were keenly aware of their reduced authority, the fragmentation of the field, and the precarious, chaotic conditions under which they had to work. They saw the root cause of their woes in the new strategic model adopted throughout the news media and inadequate government funding of the news industry.