This morning the Knight Foundation released a Gallup survey of 19,000 Americans which probes fading trust in media and the rise of disinformation. I am a member of the Foundation’s Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy. The conclusions from the survey are disturbing. The implications for public relations are profound. Here are the key findings:
- Negative Attitude Towards Media — Forty three percent have a negative view of the media, 33 percent are positive and 23 percent are neutral. The average trust score for media is 37 percent
- Objectivity — Forty four percent say they can’t think of a news source that reports the news objectively. Fox News is the most commonly cited. Sixty six percent of Americans say that media does not do a good job of separating fact from opinion. Twenty seven percent say that they are very confident that they can know when media is reporting fact versus opinion
- Media Key to Democracy but Performing Poorly — Eight in ten say that the news media are critical to our democracy, especially in ensuring accountability of leaders. More than half say that the media is not doing that job well
- Definition of Fake News in Question — Four of ten Republicans consider accurate news stories that put a candidate or party in a negative light to be fake news. Meanwhile 77 percent of respondents say that the spread of inaccurate information online is a major problem for news
- Impact of Social Media — A majority of respondents believe that social media, enabling politicians to go direct to citizens, has been a negative. By contrast, the cumulative effect of cable news, news aggregators and citizen videos online has been a positive. There is great skepticism about the platforms directing news stories to users on the basis of past reading behavior…this is a problem for democracy
- Most Frequent Source of News — Cable news is number one at 66 percent, followed by internet news websites but cable news is significantly more trusted. One in four Americans gets his/her news from a single source. An equal number say they get their news from newspapers as from social media (38 percent)
- Harder to Be a Well-Informed Citizen — By nearly two to one, Americans say it is harder to be well-informed, despite the cornucopia of information. Only half feel confident that there are enough objective sources to help them sort through bias, down from 66 percent twenty five years ago
This is a problem for many other markets. Our German colleagues told me about a made-up story on the kidnapping and rape of a 13-year-old German Russian girl in 2016 by three “Mediterranean types”, allegedly migrants. Russian media and social channels in Germany give this story full attention even though German police conclude the story is false and the girl lied. In Mexico City, in the wake of the earthquake this past September, one of the major networks, Televisa, reported that a twelve year old, Frida Sofia, had survived and was under the debris of her shattered school. Reporters from the network broadcast from the scene every hour until rescue teams said there were no more survivors. Soldiers on the scene said that Frida never existed and that she had been an invention of Televisa. Two weeks after the inferno consumed Grenfell Towers in London, a meme began to circulate on Twitter that a baby had been rescued miraculously from the flames, a complete hoax, just another made-up person. BBC Trending last week attributed the “motivations of the hoaxers to financial gain, pure pranking or bizarre political point-making.” The most disappointing is public officials making bogus claims; such is the case with UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, who claims that 350 million pounds goes every week from the UK to the European Union. The Guardian revealed that this number is “a misleading statement wrapped in a lie.”
To put this into context, read this quote from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the study of the Third Reich. She writes, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will not be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as a lie, but the senses by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”
I suggest that the public relations business move itself from a reliance on advocacy toward a new policy of informing the populace more broadly on subjects of the day. That means providing the positive and negative facts, with third party attribution. If half of the people are now relying on social media as their primary source of news, then we must take on the responsibility for educating those who would enter the dialogue. We must do everything we can to make media a force for accuracy. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s immortal quote applies now more than ever: “People are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts.”
Richard Edelman is president and CEO.