The problem of trust*

Do news media owners and editors realize their industry is in some peril? I bear anecdotal testimony, having taken a gap as a media educator and returned last year to continue where I left off. And I am not speaking simply of legacy media or independent media or those who crawled when asked to bend. These may constitute the sum of parts, but the whole seems to have taken a hit.

This is a dog-eat-dog game. Lack of transparency in the legacy media stands exposed by independent media. Scarcity of funding in independent media limits their ability to conduct journalism as we know it in routinized iterations. Rather, they must resort to sensationalist opinions. Balance may appear to be an overrated and fallacious claim to media professionals. This is a retrofit argument, of course: Journalists have found it imperative to relegate themselves as crass influencers who try to build public prejudice masquerading as public knowledge founded on semi-visibilized half-truths. But this defence of imbalance has not yet settled in most audiences' minds as a journalistic construct. They are taking advantage of the bias to entertain themselves and fortify their own biases, but in the process, the decline in their trust translates into decline of journalism itself.

The growing authoritarianism in many regions of the world has become a big boon for the news media

The declining trust has become the biggest worry for media professionals because credibility is the one thing that had been going for them. But that credibility was founded on institutional trust--the unwritten contract that persuades us to tacitly believe institutions work in our best interest.

That is why the growing authoritarianism in many regions has become a big boon for the news media. After all, what can replace trust and credibility so that the industry doesn't sink? A regular flow of moolah would do it. It doesn't matter where it comes from and what cost. But it makes the job of a media conglomerate simpler (not easier, though!). The inter-institutional collaboration is a survival game because nobody is playing the credibility game anymore except observers and researchers.

One price to pay in this loss-and-gain equilibrium is a deepening skepticism among new and emerging practitioners of the news media. Worldwide, there is a perceptible dip in interest in journalism studies at least at undergraduate levels. The independent digital media environment is still unstable both in practice and in regulatory terms. The Indian government, for example, is still seeking to regulate voices on independent digital platforms. These are not jobs, they are enterprises, fraught with financial risks. Unlike the IT sector, funding these platforms comes with political risks.

Students' familiar fascination with journalistic professions will return when trust becomes more realistic

Now, I know the media conglomerates, like most other industries, trust their ability to pivot. In the end, the conglomerates will be the last man standing, thanks in part to the political economy and in part to their overall power to strategize more professionally. Of course, this cannot be at the cost of dousing out independent voices. The loss of public trust-in-the-process is a good thing. Institutional trust cannot rest on personalities, their claims of representation, the absentations within the presentations, invisibilizations and evacuations, and camouflaged mediated politics.

As audiences grow media-literate as an organic process, their trust will be more nuanced, more qualified, less blanket. Students' familiar fascination with journalistic professions may return when the trust-distrust field becomes more realistic and less stable.

*With apologies to Adam Seligman (1997), whose book by that name is richly relevant in raising questions about why trust is problematic.