Building Trust in a Post-Truth World

In September of last year, The Economist famously ran a cover looking at Post-Truth Politics. “Fake News” took off as a meme, and memes became a powerful communications weapon. Since then, the debate about truth and facts and media accountability continues to rage, and all of us who live in the broader media ecosystem are looking at what changes we need to make. As a corporate communicator, I’m part of this news and media ecosystem. So is a reporter for the New York Times, or a subscription-first pundit in Asia, or a fresh new media outlet with a different business model.

In the past month, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with several different groups on this topic -- students and alumni at the University of Oregon journalism school, communicators at Microsoft, and most recently at a PR Week event in Seattle. My conversations always center on the environment we find ourselves in, the challenges we have in telling our stories, and the unique role we play as communicators in the world today. Here is a lightly edited version of what I shared as part of a presentation titled “Communications in a Post-Truth World.” I hope it drives a discussion with communicators and members of the news media community on how we can engage to renew trust, and make sure we improve the overall health of our media ecosystem.

Trust is the water in which we all swim. And trust in the media and in business is down. Multiple reports show that government is less trusted, media is less trusted, and business and institutions broadly are less trusted. For me, the alarm bells are ringing, because in a lot of ways, the institutions of liberal democracy are under assault from a trust standpoint. A recent report by Data & Society goes deep on some aspects of media manipulation that explains a portion of the drop in trust, but other new threats are also visible – the impact of WikiLeaks, the influence of online forums, learnings gleaned from Gamergate, and so on. For the media, these come on top of existing threats like business model changes and new competitors. For corporate communicators, the challenges of getting it right in a 24/7 global environment, the instant on nature of social media, and the fact that any event can be live streamed and captured on video represent equivalent threats to trust.

 So given this, what changes could the news media make to rebuild trust, and what do corporate communicators do differently?

 Let’s start with the news media. These suggestions are just a start – it’s a tremendously complicated topic. But every problem can be solved in small steps.

 Understand the adversary. First, media have to understand they have an adversary (or sets of adversaries), who are working to degrade their trust and standing. Not all these new actors share the same goals, but they use the same techniques to game/hack the media attention. A great starting point is to spend the time understanding what is happening and then deciding what actions to take as a result. Sometimes it feels like the news industry thinks their trust is just down … but not that it is down as a result of a concerted effort.

 Stop carrying the anti-truth virus. Right now, the media carries the virus that is damaging them. If you watch TV or read newspapers, you often see them repeat a claim, often in the name of “debunking it.” They already know something is untrue, but allow that virus to spread to their readers/listeners in an attempt to fact it out. This is not effective. Many moons ago when I was in journalism school a professor told me there is a big difference between reporting and repeating. That seems equally valid today.

 Turn off commenting systems. One of the most effective ways to cast doubt about a news story is to weigh in via comments, and most major news sites have commenting systems that are rife with misinformation. A reader then needs to try and balance the two, a truly difficult task. There are ways that organizations have tried to better moderate comments, but they tend to be resource intensive. If a news organization doesn’t have the resources, they’re better off letting their reporting stand on its own.

 Stop lending credibility. Media has to own their credibility and stop lending it out. As I mentioned earlier, data shows that “debunking” a claim – especially if part of that debunking allows an individual or group to make a statement/show up on video. The goal is often to simply cause doubt – and to spread the original misinformation. This is tricky for the media…not the least because there are times when conflict drives revenue. But at what cost?

 Companies also have work to do, to make sure they are ready to build trust in this evolving world.

 Don’t lose the trust you have. It seems simple – but it is key. Trust is a real company asset, and should be treated as such. As communicators, we have to make sure we tell the truth, we're honest, and if we make a mistake, we say we made a mistake. More broadly, every employee has to think about building and maintaining trust – from the way products are built to how they are marketing and the experience a customer has with them.

 Have the ability to tell your own story. We're all evangelists. We're all publishers. In this world where the news media can be distracted, we have to make sure that we have channels to reach people wherever they are, and whatever they're doing, across all different customer groups. Microsoft has our story site, Story Labs, where we tell rich audio-visual, long-form stories. We're on Twitter. We're on Snapchat. We're on Instagram. We do our own TV shows, This Week on Windows, and This Week on Xbox. Other companies do similar work – and every company should look at how they best tell their story.

 Lead with what you stand for, not what you are against.

It's not enough to talk about what we're against. We have to talk about what we stand for. And the more clearly we articulate what we stand for, and why, the easier it is to be clear on why we take actions.

When people understand who we are as a company, it’s easier to tell a story about our products and our services, and it's easier to recover from any mistake we might make.

 Facts aren't enough in a post-truth world.

Facts on their own are not sufficient. Matthew Inman (aka The Oatmeal) did a beautiful piece on the science behind this phenomenon … turns out our brain protects important belief systems from harm in the same way we protect our bodies from harm. This is a hard problem to overcome! But what can work is telling stories with emotion. When we share facts and data, and there's a story that lights up, we have a much higher chance of being believed.

 So, how do we communicate in this post-truth world? By recognizing the changing dynamics of news, and by understanding there are new threats to the credibility of the news media, and acting accordingly. By doing more reporting and less repeating. By being relentless about both facts and emotions. By being clear about what companies and individuals stand for.

 And by recognizing that trust, as Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank once said, is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Start earning!