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Coronavirus is (also) a communications crisis

The coronavirus pandemic is a communications crisis in addition to a medical crisis, as the outbreak is accompanied by a deluge of information, including considerable amounts of misinformation and rumours.

Handling what the WHO has called an “infodemic” is a necessary part of an effective response.

If people do not have access to reliable information from trusted sources about what they should do to protect themselves, their families, and their communities, and if they do not understand how authorities are responding, public health measures will be less effective and public health will suffer.

The response to the communications crisis should in my view ideally, just as the response to the medical crisis, be informed by expertise and up-to-date evidence.

How we respond to the coronavirus is a profoundly political question, and a question for each of us and the communities we are part of. Research cannot, should not, and will not dictate how we handle the coronavirus communications crisis, let alone the wider medical emergency and societal impact of the pandemic across our communities, the economy, and more.

But research can inform our responses, provided research is made available for us, as citizens in the public at large, as well as for decision-makers in governments, health authorities, and the like.

Communications research has a lot to offer – but are we offering it?

I believe communications research has a lot to offer in informing both public and policy decision-making in this crisis. But I think the relevance and importance of our collective work is rarely recognized. I think we are relatively absent from many of these debates. And I’m not sure we are always doing what we can to change that.

If that is so, the result will be that substantially important public (and policy) discussions of issues deeply intertwined with the core of our field are dumber than they could have been, in part due to our relative absence, an absence that I think is in turn in part due to the ways in which we as a field do our work.

I have written elsewhere (and draw on that here) about how even in high-profile cases that clearly involve issues that are in large part about communications (e.g. the role of different forms of political communication including misinformation and more in influencing various political outcomes in for example the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and UK EU Referendum), we as a field are often largely marginal to these public discussions. Instead, academics from more or less adjacent fields (economics, political science, sociology, in some countries even law) are invited to hold forth with their more or less informed views on our core object of analysis, communications.

The communications crisis around the coronavirus pandemic I think is another powerful illustration of this.

We might think we have what Thomas Gieryn calls “epistemic authority” over communications, but often, no one seems to care what we know. If we actually know more about what we study than others do – which I think we do (otherwise we might as well all go home?) – there is a consequence from our absence, an opportunity cost, a price that the public will ultimately pay in a crisis like this, as well as a consequence for our field by reinforcing the perception that we are irrelevant.

If that is so, I think we should do what we can to change it?

External and internal factors influencing our absence

So if we are relatively absent, why is that? I think there are external and internal factors (more about it here).

External factors we have no control over. They include what I think is in most countries our relatively low status as expert sources among journalists, who tend to go to others for information about our area (we aren’t exactly “primary definers”), and the way in which “knowledge regimes” in many countries are institutionalized in ways that privilege other sources of knowledge for input in policy processes than ours (they’ll probably go to the economists, lawyers, and think tanks first, no matter what we – as scholars of communication – think).

One World Health Organization webinar I attended early on, organized specifically to help others deal with the communications crisis and starting with the observation that “infodemic management must be built around evidence” featured more than a dozen expert speakers, of whom only one (Leticia Bode) to my knowledge has ever worked or published in the field of communications. (The term “infodemic” itself I think is interesting. It is not an established concept our work or social science research more broadly. It comes from a newspaper comment piece written in 2003, and while evocative, a Google Scholar search suggests almost no use of it in academic research prior to 2020.) A UK government call for social science experts to help advise them on the crisis was circulated, but did not even list media and communications research among the fields and disciplines they were interested in.

Internal factors we, at least collectively, and especially those of us who occupy positions of privilege and power within communications research, have some control over. They are rooted in some of the informal norms and formal reward systems that characterize our field. Both informally and formally, I think we often privilege a certain way of producing peer-reviewed work for a narrow academic audience to a degree that risks relegating everything else—interdisciplinary collaboration, teaching, service, let alone various forms of public engagement—to the margins. Despite some variation from country to country and university to university, at a field-level what we recognize (informal norms) and reward (formal institutions) is primarily peer-reviewed publications produced for a field-internal academic audience.

Let me underline that I strongly believe that peer-reviewed publications are an indispensable core of what we do. Public and policy engagement is not a substitute for scientific work, but engagement can enhance it and supplement scientific work, creating what Helga Nowotny calls “robust knowledge”.

It is precisely because I believe that we as scientists together can produce distinct, valuable, and reliable knowledge with a bearing on some of the big issues of our time that I am concerned with our relative irrelevance to public debates. I believe we have much to contribute to debates like the debate around how to confront the communications crisis that is part of the coronavirus pandemic.

So how visibly engaged are we as a field?

Not everyone is in a privileged enough position to prioritize engagement if informal norms and formal rewards are tightly focused on very specific things. But some of us are. Few more clearly than those we honor as ICA Fellows, all of whom are distinguished scholars, and most of whom have senior, secure positions with considerable autonomy over how they spend their time, including whether and how much they prioritize various kinds of engagement.

The ICA Fellows are formally and informally celebrated role models for our field – they do scholarship, and through the recognition we bestow on them for their distinguished work, they also model scholarship for the wider community.

So how visible are the ICA Fellows as ambassadors for their own and our collective research in the coronavirus crisis? There are many forms of meaningful public and policy engagement. Not everyone is in a position to do any, let alone all of them (our primary responsibility to those closest to us arguably takes precedent over professional responsibilities). But perhaps appearances in news coverage can give an small indication of how visible or invisible we are as a field.

There are currently 181 ICA Fellows listed on the association website. Of these, 124 are (a) alive and (b) working in an English-speaking country. Leaving aside those who are sadly no longer with us, and the many eminent colleagues who work at least in part in other languages than English, I have worked with Felix M. Simon to collect data about how frequently these 124 ICA Fellows have appeared in the news in connection with coronavirus.

Our data collection was simple, and not meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive (we don’t look at broadcast or social media, for example). It is not any way a rigorous analysis, but simply indicative of how visible we as a field are in public debate as mediated by news through these distinguished scholars who represents much of what is best in our community.

For each fellow, we have searched for them by ““FIRSTNAME LASTNAME” coronavirus” on Google News for the period from January 1 2020 till May 20 2020. To guard against human error and the often inexplicable variation in opaque systems like Google News, we both collected data for a random subset of 10 individuals. For 8 of these 10, the result was the same, for the remaining, minor variations.

In the 141 days from January 1 to May 20 (both included), these 124 distinguished communications scholars and ICA Fellows collectively appear 405 times in news coverage captured via Google News. It is worth noting here that Google News is very, let’s say, ecumenical in the definition of “news”. The University of Pennsylvania Office of University Communications is included alongside the BBC and the New York Times, as is Penn Today, run by same office, and the independent student newspaper the Daily Pennsylvanian.

Here is a bit more detail on what we find—

• Five ICA Fellows, four women, and one man, account for half the media mentions (197 mentions, 49%). They have a wide range of areas of research interests including children and media, health communication, journalism studies, and political communication

• For those who might suspect public engagement comes at the expense of scholarly impact, it is worth noting that these five ICA Fellows have Google Scholar citations ranging from over six thousand to almost fifty thousand.

• The median number of news mentions among the 124 ICA Fellows is 0. Sixty-six of them do not return any results. It’s not even really a long tail, more like a stump.

• Women make up 47 (38%) of the 124 ICA Fellows included, but account for 251 (62%) news mentions in the sample. This is heavily driven by those with the most mentions. Looking only at the 119 ICA fellows in the long tail who account for half the news mentions combined, women account for 36% of the fellows and 37% of the mentions.

(This is not a competition, and not zero-sum, but for comparison, the British political scientist John Curtice appeared 185 times in the same period when searching for him the same way on Google News. The American sociologist Ruth Milkman a 106 times. Trisha Greenhalgh, Professor of primary health care and a practising general practitioner, 158 times. All of three of them appear more often in coronavirus news stories on Google News than any of the 124 ICA Fellows included here.)

I don’t think thousands of media mentions are intrinsically valuable, but if they are ICA Fellows appearing in the news, I would have confidence that they are in most cases an important part of how our field and our collective work is presented to the wider public. In the ocean of coronavirus crisis coverage, where Chartbeat reported 2.3 million articles on COVID-19 in the first three months of the year alone, with 405 mentions of more than a hundred of our most illustrious colleagues over four months, can I say I think we are bordering on being invisible?

What do we do next?

The 2020 ICA conference theme is “Open Communication”, which our President Claes de Vreese describes as part of the wider move towards open science, among other things “oriented toward advancing scholarship through transparency, wide-ranging collaboration, and a focus on the creation of public goods [and] sharing knowledge about our research process”. And more widely across the field, I think there are moves afoot towards more engagement in different forms.

Everyone will have their own favourite examples, here are a few of mine.

In 2019, the Journalism Studies Division introduced a public engagement award for out-wards oriented work (supplementing the 12 different awards the division gives for more field-internal oriented forms of work, including multiple best paper awards for both faculty and students, best extended abstract, best poster, best article, best dissertation, best book, and best reviewer) championed by our chair Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt. The new award recognize different kinds of engagement, including informing the public about research and making it more accessible, influencing policy or professional audiences and their work, and/or involving the public directly in research projects, partnerships, events, and engaged learning approaches. The 2019 recipients were Sue Robinson and Talia Stroud, the 2020 recipient Irene Costera Meijer, all of whom command tremendous respect for their commitment to combining research excellence with public engagement.

In 2020, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a titan of our field, of political communication scholarship, and an ICA Fellow among many other honours, received the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues”. She is again a scholar who has demonstrated through an extraordinary career her commitment to combining research excellence with public engagement.

And of course there are many important examples beyond those who work mostly in English, or indeed those who appear in the news – Julia van Weert and her colleagues at the Amsterdam Center for Health Communication engage both with the public and policymakers in the Netherlands and beyond, Hye-Jin Paek is bringing her academic expertise to bear while currently working for the South Korean government. Leticia Bode as said has featured in multiple WHO settings, discussing the important work she has done with Emily Vraga.

It’s interesting to note that both in the news mentions of ICA Fellows, and the more impressionistic examples I list above, women feature far more prominently than they do in raw numbers of ICA Fellows or in the most privileged, senior positions in many parts of our field. It is worth noting here, I think, that some researchers analyzing academic work and career patterns argue that many dominant informal norms and formal rewards in the academy privilege a dominant form of masculinity associated with older and frankly stereotypical images of the natural sciences, with the lonely researcher perched atop a scientific hierarchy, far above everyday issues, and sometimes effectively punish others, often women, who chose to practice science in ways tightly bound with other societal practices concerning the production, transmission, translation and exchange of knowledge.

Men, who in all countries I know of still occupy the vast majority of senior positions and full professorships in our field, and account for 77 of the 110 ICA Fellows included in our data above, are not entirely absent of course. Not only has Claes de Vreese championed open science in communications. Another example is ICA Fellow and former Journal of Communication editor Silvio Waisbord, who explicitly argues in his book The Communication Manifesto that we need to tackle academic institutional politics if we want to strengthen public scholarship as central to the mission of communication studies. He too I think is an example of a scholar who combines research excellence with public engagement.

All these and more every day demonstrate their commitment to combining research excellence with public engagement, and demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that this is not a zero-sum trade of, but that we can be excellent scientists, and excellent at engaging with those outside of our field, at the same time. Who knows, maybe both the public and we will benefit in the process?

What could we do?

What might more public and policy engagement look like? Some of this simply requires hard work and prioritizing engagement, not as a second shift or a hobby, but as part and parcel of a scholarly vocation. If there is something akin to the marketplace of ideas John Stuart Mill described as a “rough process of struggle,” we need to get stuck in – as Hamilton sings in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, “when you got skin in the game, you stay in the game”. I would encourage in particular colleagues in privileged positions to think about whether public and policy engagement could play a larger role in their professional work.

I also think we can look for inspiration in adjacent fields for innovations. If the Washington Post can host the Monkey Cage blog drawing on political science, why not a blog on media and communications research? Many colleagues already write for the Conversation, an pieces there are sometimes re-published elsewhere. Political scientists like Brendan Nyhan and Pratap Mehta write regularly for newspapers, as do Zeynep Tufekci who may be the most prominent public voice for our kind of work right now. Beyond a narrow focus on news, there is social media, podcasts, webinars, and free online courses, and much else. Sonia Livingstone has given Ted Talks. The climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has built up a very public profile across events, news, social media, and more. Institutes like Data & Society set up by danah boyd serve as what Peter Galison calls “trading zones”,  spaces for thinkers, academic or otherwise, to listen, argue, and even collaborate and develop “interactional expertise”, the ability to talk from a position in a field to those overlapping with it, adjacent to it, and outside it.

We have a lot to offer. But we have to offer it, and I think we have to informally celebrate and formally reward those who offer it if we want to institutionalize engagement as part of communications as a field. I think we should.

And in this context I think it is particularly important that those who enjoy the rare privilege of secure employment and considerable autonomy, and who we hold up as role models for future generations of communications scholars, think about whether and how they represent our field and bring our collective expertise and knowledge into public and policy discussions of the big issues of our time.

The coronavirus pandemic is a communications crisis in addition to a medical crisis and much more. It is a moment where we can really help make a difference. I am not sure we are doing the best we can, but I hope we will try. We might even learn something ourselves about communications by offering it, and build an even stronger field. I think we will.

I wrote this post with super helpful research assistance from Felix after a panel at ICA 20 chaired by Claes H. de Vreese, where Hye-Jin Paek from the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Hanyang University (working in South Korean government currently); Julia van Weert, Professor of Health Communication at the University of Amsterdam; Dietram A Scheufele, Taylor-Bascom Chair in Science Communication and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Leticia Bode, Associate Professor at Georgetown University, and I had a chance to discuss how our work as communications researchers might matter in the coronavirus crisis. Watch it here and more about our RISJ COVID-19 research here.

Was asked to give a few remarks at the 2020 Dahrendorf Colloquium organized by Timothy Garton Ash at St Antony’s College in Oxford today. Really interesting discussion with six of us kicking off discussions of six big questions relevant for the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, with Rana Mitter talking on China, David Priestland on Russia, Kate Sullivan de Estrada on India in terms of geopolitics, and then Paul Collier on the future of capitalism, Dieter Helm on Climate change and energy policy, and myself on the internet and AI.

I had 5 minutes, so necessarily short. Also, meant to tee up a discussion that goes far beyond my own core expertise. A cleaned-up transcript below with a few links added.

Empires by innovation? A few thoughts on the internet, AI, and Europe/the US

I’ve been asked to speak about the internet and AI with a focus on differences or convergences between US and European approaches

I’ll talk about the Internet first, AI second, then US and Europe

First the internet.

The internet increasingly is turning into only partially overlapping and interoperable “splinternets” as states assert control and regulate more and more.

Wendy Hall and Kieran O’Hara suggest we can think of as at least four different internets, Silicon Valley’s “libertarian internet” (they call it “open internet”), Brussels’ “bourgeois internet”, Beijing’s “authoritarian internet”, and Washington DC’s “commercial internet”.

But even as many states are asserting more control, leading to greater regulatory divergence, outside of those countries where they are in practice prevented from operating, we see greater practical convergence, as a growing part of the practical infrastructure of free expression, at least at the application and operating system-level, is operated by a limited number of US-based, for-profit private platform companies that people increasingly rely on for a large part of their news and information needs (and much more).

Consider just two datapoints from the UK

First, our media environments are already digital-first. According to eMarketer, in 2019, adults in the UK spend on average 23 percent of their time with media watching television, 15 percent listening to radio, and 55 percent online across smartphones, tablets, and personal computers.

Second, whereas domestic media dominate offline media (in early 2019, we found that the BBC accounted for 63% of all radio listening in the UK, and 31% of all linear scheduled television viewing), US-based platforms loom large online. In early 2019, the BBC accounted for just 1.5% of all time spent with digital media. By comparison, Google’s various products and services made up 22% of all time spent with digital media, and Facebook’s 14%.

This shift is in part the result of choice, people have access to printed newspapers, broadcast, and countless websites, and in practice choose to spend much of their time online, and primarily with a limited number of platforms, who over time build up dominant positions for their core services, even as they face competition more widely for attention and advertising.

So in terms of individual behaviour, we have practical convergence, as people seek out and use the same set of platforms in the US and Europe, even as we see institutional differences and regulatory divergences, as the implications of this move are, and are seen as, somewhat different.

All the major platforms are based in the US, most responsive to US stakeholders, whether private companies or political actors, suffused with (some) US values, and often design first for US market and regulatory context, then roll out elsewhere afterwards. Overseas, I think they are seen by many as fundamentally US entities.

In Europe, they are in practice embraced by hundreds of millions of people – an embrace sometimes accompanied by considerable reservations about their data collections practices etc., but an embrace nonetheless – even as many European activists and NGOs, many European private companies, and many European policymakers worry about the consequences of the rise of what we might call rival, competing, commercial “empires by innovation”, with a nod to Geir Lundestad’s notion that the expansion of US power in Western Europe during the early years of the Cold War was the expansion of “Empire by Invitation”. (The empire analogy is imperfect – the platforms do not rely on physical violence and are not exactly monarchical in their governance, so far from the authoritarian bloodbath of the British Empire – but perhaps generative in drawing attention to how they extend power relations across spaces where they have no prior or given sovereignty, legal or otherwise, and where, in one or more of the domains, they gain some measure of extensive hegemony over those spaces that help them extract or accrue value.)

Second, AI

What does this mean for AI?

I’m not a technical expert but I’m happy to point to a few institutional dynamics.

I think changes in how we use the internet has led to a situation where large US-based companies play an increasingly important role in structuring European public debate, news, and information, completely integrated into their technical and data-extraction structures, and where Europe in turn is these companies’ second-most important market currently, accounting for a large part of their revenues, in many cases something like a quarter.

This means, first, that when these large technology companies increasingly rely on machine learning and other forms of AI as part of their various ranking algorithms, these (for-profit) AI technologies increasingly shape public debate, news, and information in Europe – in 2019, for example, we found, looking across 38 markets, including more than 20 in Europe, that just 29% of internet news users say going direct to news sites or apps is their main way of accessing news online, compared with 53% who say that various forms of algorithmic selection, including search engines, social media, and news aggregators, as their main way of accessing news online.

It means, second, that, given their popularity and pervasiveness, the biggest US-based platforms not only have more money to invest in developing AI, and a greater ability to recruit and retain tech talent, they also often have greater ability to extract in volume, at velocity, and with variety, much of the data that powers the practical application of most AI technologies in Europe, than many of their European competitors. (Thought there are other kinds of data than the consumer data platforms extract online, including industrial and inter-organizational data, and that the quality of the data platforms extract on the two final Vs of the “5 Vs” of big data, veracity and value—yet to be seen.)

The big US-based platforms are thus the most visible incarnations of what Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism”, oriented not just to the accumulation of profit, but also of data, but they are far from alone, and both European companies and European politicians would actually rather like to grow European surveillance capitalists champions (always, everyone will hasten to add, as the US incumbents do too, in a “privacy-compliant fashion”). This is an interesting situation where we have a technology industry often associated with libertarianism behaving in a way some would say is fundamentally illiberal, especially when pursued by private enterprise and executive power working in concert, as we have seen for examples in collaborations between AT&T and the NSA.

It means third, because the big US-based platforms make so much money in Europe, that they would like to continue to operate here and are thus likely to acquiesce to many forms of regulation and other forms of political intervention.

Third, then, the US and Europe

What the, given the practical convergence, and the central role of a few US companies with global reach, are the differences between between the US and Europe (with China lurking in the background)?

One of them is regulation.

Crudely put, I think the difference can be summarized thus:

1. US companies build many of the new technologies that countless people and a multitude of private companies and public authorities choose to use, both in the US and Europe (and China provides more and more of the infrastructure and hardware).
2. The US politically has chosen to mostly regulate these technologies by not really regulating them very much, as suggested by Hall and O’Hara’s notions of the libertarian and commercial internets (with a bit of national security lurking in the background, some interesting ideas circulating in left-leaning legal circles, and much sound and fury from Donald Trump, but no new action yet)
3. Europe, in contrast, increasingly try to actively regulate these technologies both at the EU level and the member state level, across data protection and privacy, eCommerce, competition, taxation, AI, and responses to misinformation.
4. And, at least looking at misinformation, our survey research suggest greater public acceptance of government intervention in Europe than in the US.
5. So the US is building technologies, but regulating through non-regulation, and Europe is not really building very much, but regulating. (China, meanwhile, is both building AND actively regulating, and keeping out technology companies from elsewhere unless they fully comply with often draconian rules and regulations.)

In one sense, this makes Europe very powerful – through what Anu Bradford calls the “Brussels effect”, where the EU exercise a unique power to influence global corporations and set the rules of the game by acting in the regulatory space (while the US does little or nothing), with many countries across the world then choosing, effectively between doing nothing (like the US), following Europe, or imitating China.

But in another sense, this power is not easy to exercise in a convoluted European-level political system, with democratic member states’ own domestic political dynamics, and complex national and regional economies, where “Europe” is not one thing, does not necessarily agree on what it values and interests “it” wants to promote, and where even individual actors, whether us as citizens and end users, private companies, or public authorities, often have multiple and not always easily aligned priorities.

As individuals, many of us may have reservations for example about how technology companies collect and use data, even as we use their products and services every day, often quite like to use them, and find them very useful.

As private companies, many European corporations may have reservations about how they are becoming more and more reliant on large US-based technology companies both in terms of reaching their customers and often in terms of their technical back-end, even as they also use their products and services every day, often quite like to use them, and find them very useful.

And among public authorities, European politicians might have reservations about the impact of, say social media and microtargeted advertising, even as they use them to campaign and communicate with the public, often quite like to use them, and find them very useful, and some European public authorities might have reservations about the use of, say, AI-powered facial recognition technologies, even as we know from independent reporting that law enforcement in many European countries have already been using these technologies, would quite like to use them, and would probably find them very useful.

So, in summary—

Even as increased assertiveness at both the state- and EU-level is driving regulatory divergence, there is considerable practical convergence as end users, private companies, and public authorities in Europe often embrace the same US-based tech companies as their American counterparts do –leading to the formation of competing commercial ‘empires by innovation’. (As with the US Cold War “empire by invitation”, this is complicated and in some ways problematic, but also not necessarily the worst actually existing option. Was my native Denmark worse of for joining the American international order? I don’t think so personally, even as I am keenly aware of the many downsides to this order.)

This in turn means that these US-based tech companies are increasingly important in Europe, and able to both apply their various technologies, more or less reliant on AI, and collect great amounts of data, but also that they make so much money that they are likely to acquiesce to forms of regulation that might lead them to withdraw from smaller, less lucrative markets.

This gives Europe power to act – especially in a situation where the US politically has chosen not to act – but how to act, and in the pursuit of what balance of what values and interests, that is the question.

“The truth is hard”

I’ve come across this quote repeatedly in the past year, most frequently in the form of ads for the New York Times at various media events. It always makes me think of the divide between the vanguard and the rearguard over the future of journalism.

New York Times ad at the World News Media Congress in Glasgow, June 2019

One truth that is not hard is this: in my first year as Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, I have been truly and thoroughly inspired by the ambition, desire, and fight for change in journalism among many journalists, editors, and media leaders.

Let’s call them the vanguard.

While the vanguard is often young, it is not only young – Maria Ressa at Rappler and Marty Baron of the Washington Post are not spring chickens, and they are forging towards the future of journalism, as are Kath Viner at the Guardian, Siddharth Varadarajan from The Wire, and many others who have been through a thing or two. But perhaps it is also about age—the absolutely certainty among many that journalism as we knew it will not thrive in the 21st century, combined with suspicion among some older journalists that it may yet last their time out.

That latter part is a harder truth to face, the persistence of a mindset that risks doing lasting damage to the profession of journalism and the news media organizations that enable it, and make a number of already tough challenges even tougher. It is the mindset of those who say they believe that people will cool on their smartphones and pick up print, that people will ditch video-on-demand and return to linear scheduled broadcasting, that journalists can safely condescend upon and harmlessly ridicule as conspicuously woke or ridiculously politically correct the values and priorities of new generations.

This is the rearguard.

This mindset is invisible at most “future of journalism” gatherings, but I meet at least some of them at every industry event I attend, many in most media organization I visit, and they have plenty of kindred spirits among (older) policymakers.

The rearguard thinks the problem is that the world has changed too much. The vanguard thinks the problem is that journalism hasn’t changed enough.

Nothing is ever black or white, but crudely put, I see one group of journalists and media leaders who want to develop and change the profession and the funding models that sustain it so they are fit for a changing world and a digital media environment. But I also, constantly, everywhere, come across another group of journalists and media leaders who do not see it this way, who would rather pour their energy into vain attempts at trying to restore a romanticized past, airbrushed of its shortcomings, idealized for its (very real) virtues, and valued for the stability it offered many, both in terms of professional security and career advancement as well as in terms of the media business.

From my experience, the younger generation is overwhelmingly in the first group. The older generation? More mixed. The vanguard is full of women and more diverse. The rearguard full of white men like me.

Both the vanguard and the rearguard care about journalism, but the divide between them is a problem for the profession and the industry, for while the first group is fighting for various visions of an uncertain future, the second group is defending a defunct past that—while it had much to offer—will in many ways no longer serve. The older parts of the rearguard won’t even necessarily experience the full consequences of their own conservatism. Business as usual, perhaps with a bit of hand-waving about AI and blockchain for garnish, may in fact last their time out (if they are close enough to retirement). But in the process, this mindset will continue to undermine journalism’s ability to adapt, remake, and renew itself, and the profession as a whole, especially younger journalists, will have to live with the consequences of this conservatism. This is an often unacknowledged, but ever-present and very real, generational divide in journalism.

“The truth isn’t so obvious”

That’s another part of that same New York Times advertisement. And don’t we know it. When we redefined the Reuters Institute’s mission this year as “exploring the future of journalism worldwide through debate, engagement, and research”, it was premised on three things: (1) we don’t want to fight yesterday’s battles, but will look toward the future, (2) we don’t know what that future looks like, or should look like, so we want to explore it by all means available, and (3) we don’t believe anyone can succeed on this journey on their own, so we will focus on collaboration and conversation.

But there are some things we do know, and while these things may count among the truths that the New York Times counts as hard to hear, they are also truths that cannot be glossed over.

• Journalism is important for democracy. (Yes – often for good, but sometimes for ill.)
• Journalism is important for holding communities and societies together. (Yes – but also sometimes dividing them.)
• Journalism is an important part of the media and technology business. (Yes – but small and shrinking.)

In my experience, many in the rearguard would like to stop with just the celebratory first part of each statement. They seem to prefer an after-dinner speech celebrating the value of journalism at its best to an accurate description of journalism and its actual state.

But, as each of the parentheses suggest, we cannot truthfully stop there.

And while an after-dinner speech may feel good, planning your future as if it is an analysis will lead to catastrophic, avoidable outcomes.

Furthermore, while the public may be willing to at least consider the after-dinner speech version of what journalism is and what it means (we still have a reservoir of goodwill), they don’t buy it as a description.

Much of the public does not trust journalism, consider it to be of limited value (or even a drain on them), and pay little attention to it. This disregard goes well beyond the imperfections that most journalists are already willing to contemplate.

Consider just three findings from Reuters Institute research in the past year as an illustration of each point—

• Trust: Since 2015, we have seen a drop of trust in news by about ten percentage points in many of the countries we have been tracking in the Digital News Report, and by now less than half of our respondents say they trust most news most of the time.
• Value: When asked in 2019 whether the news media help them understand the news of the day, just 51 percent agreed. (Fifty-one percent! Nearly half the public does not find that news media help them understand the news.) And a third say they actively try to avoid news often or sometimes.
• Attention: Online, people spend only about three percent of their time with news and information. A major public service media organization like the BBC still accounts for 63 percent of linear radio listening in the UK and 31 percent of linear television viewing, but just 1.5 percent of digital media use (and BBC News just 0.6%). Online news reach is a mile wide but all too often only a quarter-inch deep—and increasingly unequally distributed.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that we face these issues. Lucy Küng has a passage from an interview that she often returns to in discussions of the business of news.

Interviewer: “What was your biggest mistake?”

Media industry CEO: “I always say that if I could go back ten years, … , I would not be saying, ‘The Internet’s going to be big’ … what I would really be saying is, ‘Your business is going to be more screwed than you can even conceive of now. Your worst case scenario is just a scratch’.”

“Just a scratch.” What if this applies to journalism’s connection to the public as well as to the business of news?

Journalism exists in the context of its audience. Its public value, its political power, its social significance, its viability as a business, its legitimacy as a beneficiary of public and philanthropic funding—all of it is premised on its connection with its audience. That connection is in many cases hanging by a thread, and it is on us to retain, renew, and reinforce it.

The vanguard understands this. The rearguard refuses to accept it.

“The truth is powerful”

The push-back that we often get when we present findings like these suggests that some in the profession and the industry prefer tame cheerleaders to independent researchers, and dismiss challenging findings as depressing doom-mongering. Some, it seems, would prefer only research that suggests journalism is great, and was even greater in the past.

Most of the vanguard, in contrast, embrace our research, as much of it again and again underlines the absolute necessity of change, change that will have to go well beyond this or that question of tactics, optimization, or refinement, and concerns basic question of purpose (what are we for?), value (what problems are we trying to solve for whom?), and strategy (how do we get to where we need to be to do that?).

The rearguard? The prevailing assumption there seems to be that hard truths are for other people.

The attitude seems to be that we should romanticize the journalism that, for all its values, also arguably failed us on climate change, in the run-up to the financial crisis, and in uncritical coverage of digital media throughout the 2000s, a journalism that has often seemed as out of touch with the energies behind #BlackLivesMatter, #Fightfor15, #MeToo as with the groundswells of support for Brexit, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump, a journalism that is still all too often based on a mass media business model that won’t make sense much longer.

But hard truths aren’t only for other people. They are also for us.

At the Reuters Institute, we will continue to pursue independent, evidence-based, internationally-oriented research on as many of the major issues facing journalism worldwide as we can, whether the findings are comforting or not, whether they concern the many external challenges over which we have little control (political pressure, increasingly challenging business, the growth of platform companies), or the internal ones that we, together, can in fact address (how we engage with people, create value and gain trust, and change our own organizations).

The Reuters Institute is not on anybody’s side, vanguard or rearguard, but our findings are overwhelmingly aligned with the vanguard’s view of the world, and rarely the rearguard’s. (If the facts change, our views will too.) We will explore the future of journalism with anyone who wants to engage (and with the help of a new Steering Committee and a new Advisory Board that better reflect the diversity of our journalism fellowship program and the wider profession).

We hope we—through debate, engagement, and research—can help more journalists, editors, and media leaders develop their own understanding of (a) how our media environment is changing, (b) what it means for their organization, and (c) what they can do to succeed professionally and organizationally in that changing environment.

Everyone should make up their own mind, but with every program we run, every event we attend, every report we publish, I see a few more people – some young, some old – come to the conclusion that more of the same isn’t the answer, that going back to the past is neither right nor possible, and that we have to forge ahead towards an uncertain future instead. In short I see them joining the vanguard, a vanguard where there’s always room for more, and a vanguard that needs experience as much as it needs energy, insight as much as it needs innovation.

That matters, because rearguard action won’t lead us to the future, and no one else is riding to the rescue – not platforms, not foundations, and not governments. If journalism and the business of news that sustains (and constrains) it is to be saved, it has to save itself, if it is to be remade, it has to remake itself.

And I promise you this: we will continue to call it as we see it, despite the stream of angry emails I get every time our research falls short of the rearguard’s self-understanding, or challenge some of the truisms of how journalism and the news industry like to present itself to the public and to policymakers.

We do this just as journalism seek truth and report it, not because it knows exactly what the future will hold, or precisely how to solve the issues of our day, but because journalism, at its best, is premised on the belief that the truth is powerful. That people with access to relevant reliable information and a chance to discuss it with their peers will make better choices.

That same role is the one that we to the best of our ability try to play vis-à-vis the profession, the news media industry, and its various interlocutors – provide independent evidence and analysis, foster and host debate, insistent on the importance of facing the big issues, however inconvenient and uncomfortable it might be for various incumbents and elites. This, a focus on exploring the future of journalism through debate, engagement, and research, is our answer to the question I asked last year when I took the role as Director: what we can do to help journalists (and all of us who rely on journalism) reinvent the profession and the industry?

We don’t know what the answers are, and we don’t know what exactly the future holds for journalism, but we want to be part of that journey, and we will continue the search for answers through our journalism fellowship programs, our leadership programs, and our research programs.

Not as tame cheerleaders (or depressed doom-mongers). But as explorers of the future of journalism.

We hope you’ll join us.

What books (related to journalism) have impacted your life?

In early September, a journalist asked me this, and I named four of mine—

• Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Alexievich’s ability to give voice to the voiceless is such I have to carry tissues whenever I read her books.)
• Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (Malcolm’s book is the best I know on the complexities of journalists’ relation with sources (Hard to beat her opening!))
• Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 (Thompson’s book on the 1972 election is crazy, raw, entertaining and thought-provoking, and a rougher version of what I suppose some would call literary non-fiction.)
• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (This I think is still the single best analytical treatment of the role of journalism in (Western) society – a classic almost a century after it was published.)

I also asked people on Twitter for what books on journalism had impacted their lives, and got a lot of really interesting responses, I’m posting the first 100 recommendations I got below (sorry if I’ve missed some, it got very lively).

Just to be clear, I haven’t read all of these myself, and I don’t know whether I’d personally recommend them all, but it’s a great list and I hope others will find it inspiring – I’ve just finished Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff’s The Race Beat which was outstanding and I warmly recommend it (as Javier Moreno and others did to me), and have just started Jan Whitt’s Women in American Journalism.

The list is still very heavily male-dominated and overwhelmingly voices from the US and Europe, so very keen to see more suggestions for a broader range and more diverse voices. Can then update the list.

Non-fiction books including biographies, autobiographies, etc.

Zahra Hankir & Christiane Amanpour, Our Women On the Ground

Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice

Bernstein/Woodward, All the President’s Men

Alan Rusbridger, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters

Joris Luyendijk, People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East

Hostwriter and CORRECTIV (publishers), Unbias the News: Why diversity matters for journalism

Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

Katharine Graham, Personal History

Ed Snowden, Permanent Record

Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing

Jeff Jarvis, Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News

David Carr, The Night of the Gun

Jan Whitt, Women in American Journalism

Phillip Meyer, Paper Route: FINDING MY WAY TO PRECISION JOURNALISM

Jay Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives

Michael Schudson, Discovering the News

Joan Didion, Political Fictions

James W. Carey, Communication as Culture

Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus

David Halberstam, The Powers that Be

Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

Ernest Hemingway, By-line

Chris Horrie, Stick it Up Your Punter: The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper

Paul Starr, Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications

Robert E. Park, The National History of The Newspaper

Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat

Ben Bradlee, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures

Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice

John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage

George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

D Q McInerny, Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking

Ed Lambeth, Committed Journalism: An Ethic for the Profession

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Gossman with the Red Army 1941-1945

George Orwell, Essays

John W. Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years

Fintan O’Toole, Back at the Ranch (The Politics of Irish Beef)

Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit

Bharat Anand, The Content Trap

Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

John Simpson, Despatches from the Barricades

A.J.  Liebling, The Press

Tim Bowden, One Crowded Hour: Noel Davis, Combat Cameraman, 1934-85

Edward Behr, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

David Carr, The night of the gun

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Andrew Marr, My Trade: A short history of British Journalism

Nicholas Coleridge, Paper Tigers: The latest, greatest newspaper tycoons and how the won the world

Harold Evans, Essential English and Pictures on a Page

Seymour Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir

Marvin Kalb, The Nixon Memo

Hanna Krall, Shielding the flame: Intimate Conversation with Dr.Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Robert Boynton, The New New Journalism

Dave Cullen, Columbine

Max du Preez, Palle Native: Memories of a Renegade Reporter

Sebastian Junger, War

Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Greg Marinovich, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War

Hans Rosling, Factfulnesss: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Jon Swain, River of Time

Michael Herr, Dispatches

Antonio Rubio, El Origen del Gal: Guerra Sucia y Crimen de Estado

Marie Colvin, On the Front Line: the Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin

Maria Angelica Correa, A Ese Muchacho lo van a matar

John Pilger, Heroes

Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History and Conversations with Power

Markus Feldenkirchen, Die Schulz-Story

Ryan Holiday, Trust me, I’m lying

T S Satyan, Alive and Clicking

T J S George, Lessons in Journalism: The story of Pothan Joseph

Nils Ufer, Den nøgne journalist

Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

Charlie LeDuff, Shitshow: The Country is Collapsing but the Ratings are Great

Chris Hedges, War is a force that gives us meaning

Willie Morris, North Toward Home

Jacques Pauw, The President’s Keepers

Paul Krassner, Impolite Interviews

Aman Sethi, A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

John Hess, My Times: A Memoir of Dissent

Jorge Ramos, Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era

Essays, fiction and literary non-fiction (and borderline cases like Capote, some of Kapuscinski, Thompson)

Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Other

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island

Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

Vasily Grossman, Life & Fate

Heinrich Boll, The lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Hunter S Thompson, The Rum Diary

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

David Foster Wallace, Consider the lobster

Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs

Jim Lynch, Truth Like the Sun

Eugenio Corti, The Red Horse

Erich Hackl, The Wedding in Auschwitz

The inimitable Shannon McGregor and Sarah Bachleda has collected some book reading recommendations for political communication scholars at the 4th annual #AcademicSquadGoals mentoring happy hour at the American Political Science Association annual meeting this summer (more here #academicsquadgoals and on Twitter here).

Shannon kindly suggested I post them here to make them more widely available.

Here goes (and many thanks to Shannon and Sarah for collecting and sharing) —

Public service media are often widely used, highly trusted, and do not face the business pressures with which their private peers have to contend. But a closer look suggests that the challenges that face public service media news provision are bigger – much bigger – than is commonly acknowledged, even in countries with a long history of strong public service media.

We use survey data from the Digital News Report to analyze the audience for public service news and find that it is old, educated, and politically diverse, and that public service media in many countries fall far short of the ambition to provide a near-universal news service, especially online.

That’s the key finding in a new Reuters Institute report, led by Anne Schulz, working with David Levy and myself.

Read the full report here.

I’ve served as chair of the American Political Science Association Political Communication Section’s Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award award committee, serving alongside Holli Semetko and Markus Prior. The award is given every two years to recognize a lifetime contribution to the study of Political Communication.

I’m delighted to share that the award this year is going to Professor Ann Crigler from the University of Southern California and Professor Paolo Mancini from Università di Perugia, both of whom I have learned a lot from, and both of whom have demonstrated the value of collaborative work.

Below is the award text.

The award committee for the 2019 Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award, which recognizes a lifetime contribution to the study of Political Communication and is awarded every other year, consisted of Holli Semetko, Markus Prior, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (chair).

This year, the committee made a unanimous decision to recognize two scholars for the contribution each of them have made through their lifetime of service and their scholarship, individually and with various co-authors.

We would therefore like to congratulate Professor Ann Crigler from the University of Southern California and Professor Paolo Mancini from Università di Perugia, who both will receive a Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award from the American Political Science Association Political Communication Section this year.

For both Professor Crigler and Professor Mancini, we would like to briefly recognize both some the scholarship they have done as well as how they both model scholarship in a way we can all draw inspiration from.

For Professor Crigler, we would in particular highlight her ground-breaking and wide-ranging work including her 1992 book with W. Russell Neuman and Marion Just “Common Knowledge” on news and the construction of meaning, as well as her 1996 book “Crosstalk” where she with a team of five co-authors examine interactions between citizens, candidates, and the media in a presidential campaign. Among her extensive record of work on political communication, public opinion, and political psychology, these books are just two examples of theoretically ambitious, methodologically innovative, empirically grounded analysis of substantially important questions that has helped the field as a whole advance.

For Professor Mancini, beyond his important role in the development of political communication as a field of study in Italy specifically and Europe more broadly, we want to highlight his pioneering role in developing comparative frameworks for and perspectives on political communication. This has been driven by his own single-authored publications as well as a number of important articles, edited books, and monographs with different collaborators, including both the “Politics, media, and modern democracy” edited with David Swanson in 1996 as well as his collaborations with Daniel C. Hallin on a number of projects including their 2004 book “Comparing Media Systems: Three models of media and politics.”

We want to recognize both Professor Crigler and Professor Mancini for their individual lifetime contribution to the study of political communication through their scholarship. We would also like to recognize how they both model scholarship through their life-long commitment to a combination of individual and co-authored work, and want to underline that the two Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Awards given today demonstrates how one can advance the study of political communication theoretically, methodologically, and substantially in a collaborative fashion, and how important it is that we as a field recognize and reward everyone involved in such collegial work.

Jay Rosen publishes a list of his “top problems” in journalism from time to time, and Jeff Jarvis has chipped in with his worries.

I encourage you to read both, and think of your own problems and worries (and there are plenty of both), but wanted to add my own list of hopes to supplement.

Good journalism stands out, creates public value, and is rewarded for it…

… not everywhere, and not always as much as one would hope, but the fact that publisher after publisher, from local media group AMedia in Norway over digital-born sites like Mediapart in France and national titles like Dagens Nyheter in Sweden to international brands like the New York Times report that exclusive stories, well-reported investigations, and original angles are among the key drivers of loyalty and subscriptions gives me hope that good journalism and good business can go hand in hand.

The next generation of leaders in news are amazing and unafraid…

… they care about their mission and their profession, they are proud of journalism’s history but not stuck in its past, they actively want to change and to work with colleagues across editorial, product, and business because they know no one can do it alone. I can’t be a pessimist in a world with people like Melissa Bell, Peter Wolodarski, Niddal Salah-Eldin, Supriya Sharma, Gary Liu, Angela Pacienza, Alvin Ntibinyane, Hannah Suppa, and countless others like them leading the profession and the industry towards the future.

We can fight the tide of misinformation without sacrificing our liberties to censors or filters…

… as demonstrated by all those doing pioneering work rejecting both, on the one hand, the draconian measures pursued, sometimes deliberately and with open eyes, sometimes in good faith but poorly thought through, and, on the other hand, the unacceptable status quo daily further undermining trust in the institutions and infrastructures that enable free speech. Just look at the work of Claire Wardle, David Kaye, Joan Donovan, Will Moy, and their colleagues and counterparts.

The best journalism today is better than it has ever been…

… taking on everyone from the most powerful politicians to the biggest companies in the world, exposing them to public scrutiny, holding them to account for what they do. More broadly, at its best, journalism today is more accessible, more timely, more informative, more interactive, more engaged with its audience—and frankly less arrogant—than in the past. Every day the work of everyone from Julia Angwin, Hannah Dreier, and Marty Baron in the US to Carlos Chamorro in Nicaragua, Maria Ressa in the Philippines, and Siddharth Varadarajan in India and many more across the world fills me with hope for the future of journalism.

There is plenty to be worried about – the world is a worrying place – but this, the people mentioned, and many others like them I meet at the Reuters Institute and across the world, makes me hopeful. They are not flights of fancy, or a false balance to counter others’ problems and worries — they are reality-based grounds for conditional optimism.

How do local journalists think about editorial quality in a changing environment?

In a new article led by Joy Jenkins (who did amazing work for us at RISJ on local news), we use in-depth 48 interviews from across Finland, France, Germany, and the UK to identify the main value aspirations, and find a focus on traditional values like proximity and public service but also on popularity.

Thus, while some critics and commentators see quality journalism in opposition to popular journalism, our interviewees see quality and popularity as going hand in hand.

Abstract below, full article here.

Local media around the world are facing challenges, including shrinking staff sizes and diminished advertising and subscription revenues. They are also working to adapt their editorial processes to meet the needs of online audiences. This comparative study used in-depth interviews with managers, editors, and reporters at local and regional newspapers in four countries to examine how they define and distinguish quality journalism and the challenges and opportunities for producing quality work in the digital environment. The findings show that local journalists remain focused on providing journalism that serves the needs of their communities, reflecting traditional news values, such as proximity and public service. However, their considerations of quality local news are also evolving to embrace forms of journalism that can draw broad online audiences, such as service, solutions, and constructive approaches. While normative theories and some critics may place quality journalism in opposition to popular journalism, local journalists in practice do not see quality and popularity in opposition but as going hand in hand.

Today, we’ve published our annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

Covering 38 markets globally across 6 continents (with the addition of South Africa this year), it is our biggest report ever.

It is an incredibly rich and varied picture of a rich and varied media environment, with marked country-to-country differences, which you can explore in the PDF of the main report (found here) or by diving into the data and interactives on the report website here.

Still, I think there are some key, globally-relevant findings from across the report that lead author Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, and all our many country partners have produced.

FIRST, we find only a small increase in the overall numbers paying for any online news, and even in countries with higher levels of payment, the vast majority only have ONE online subscription – suggesting that ‘winner takes all’ dynamics are likely to be important. More and more publishers are chasing subscribers from the same highly educated, more affluent, news-loving minority of people.

SECOND, the role of platforms continue to evolve – in many countries, people are spending less time with Facebook and more time with WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube than this time last year. Few users are abandoning Facebook entirely, though, and it remains by far the most important social network for news. Voice activated speakers are spreading quickly, but with very limited use for news so far.

THIRD, the move to messaging applications and groups is present everywhere but with very significant country difference — WhatsApp has become a primary network for discussing and sharing news in non-Western countries like Brazil (53%) Malaysia (50%), and South Africa (49%) (much less widely used for news in many Western countries). Facebook Groups for discussing news and politics have become popular in Turkey (29%) and Brazil (22%) (but again much less used in Western countries such as Canada (7%) or Australia (7%)).

FOURTH, the majority of our respondents across 38 markets worry about what is real and fake on the internet, and over a quarter (26%) say they have started relying on more ‘reputable’ sources of news as a result, plus a quarter (24%) saying they had stopped using sources that had a dubious reputation in the last year. While this will help some publishers, the often low trust in news overall – and in many individual brands – underlines this is not necessarily a development that will help everyone in the industry.

FIFTH, while people are demonstrating (by paying attention and by paying) that they find some journalism valuable, it is also clear that people are not impressed by much of what they come across, and the issues go well beyond trust. While almost two-thirds of our respondents say the media are good at keeping people up to date (62%), they are seen as less good at helping them understand the news (51%). And less than half (42%) think the media do a good job in holding rich and powerful people to account.

As always, all the underlying data is available for those interested in doing additional analysis, and we will work on further in-depth studies of these any many other issues, going beyond the main report in the months to come.

Thanks to everyone involved, at the RISJ, our country partners, and the 15 different funders making this possible.