The forthcoming article “Can Americans’ trust in local news be trusted? The emergence, sources, and implications of the local news trust advantage” by Erik Peterson, Joshua P. Darr, Maxwell B. Allamong, and Michael Henderson is summarized by the author(s) below.
In recent decades media trust has substantially declined and there are large partisan divides in how the American public views most news sources. Our article shows trust in local media is an important exception to these developments.
We analyze a collection of surveys from across the past 40 years to show local news has been more trusted than the national media since the late 1990s. The local news trust advantage still exists today and is present even among those who are skeptical of the media as a whole.
We go on to demonstrate some complications from these favorable views of local news. The public now uses the apparent “localness” of a media outlet as a shortcut when deciding whether to trust it. In survey experiments where they evaluate unfamiliar news sources, adding a local cue to a news organization’s name leads people to view it more favorably, even though they have no experience with its coverage. When evaluating real digital news sources covering their community, people trust unreliable information providers that signal a local focus more than high-quality local news sources that do not.
As views of the national media have become negative, our study reveals that an underappreciated pool of local media trust still exists. Signaling a local focus allows unfamiliar news providers to tap into these positive views, explaining why many groups trying to influence public opinion now package their messages like local news reports. This development, and the observation that some of the reliable local news sources now starting to operate on the Internet do not clearly convey their local focus, means distinguishing between these different types of local information providers is an important and ongoing challenge for the public in a changing media environment.
About the Author(s): Erik Peterson is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Rice University, Joshua P. Darr is an associate professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, Maxwell B. Allamong is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology and The Polarization Lab at Duke University, and Michael Henderson is an associate professor in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Their research “Can Americans’ trust in local news be trusted? The emergence, sources, and implications of the local news trust advantage” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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