B&I Workshop: Yanna Krupnikov (Michigan)

Yanna Krupnikov (Michigan) will present her talk, "What Do People Expect from the News Media?".

Abstract:
Trust in mainstream news and legacy media has declined precipitously over the last two decades. This decline in trust has become a focal point in both research and discourse, fueling concerns about levels of information within the public, the future of mainstream media and even more broadly, the function of representative democracy generally. Trust, however, is just one (easier to measure) part of people's broader relationship with the media; more likely, it is a proxy for more complex negative feelings that people have about the news. To understand how people feel about the media, we look beyond trust, instead turning to two questions: What do people expect of the news media? and Could the news media ever meet these expectations? We begin with one aspect of these questions, tracking people's perceptions of what makes an "informative" news article. Relying on both qualitative data and experimental analyses, we find that people's preferences diverge from political communication research on best journalistic practices. People, our results suggest, believe that attempts to thematically contextualize news events - often to tell a broader story - are signs of journalistic bias rather than effective news coverage. (joint research with John Barry Ryan)