If democracy depends on the support of an informed public what does it mean when people distrust what they read and hear in the news?
Democracy as a form of government relies on an informed public. The founders of democracy in the United States, which became a model for much of the world, recognized the connection between democracy and the press when writing the U.S. Constitution. Freedom of the press became one of the five pillars in the very first amendment to the Constitution.
Moreover, one of the first acts was to establish an inexpensive postal system, in part so that newspapers could be distributed cheaply.
But now we have an upside down world. Through the internet and the magic of artificial intelligence, news can be delivered at an insignificant cost, resulting in so many news sources that many people shut news out all together or are confused by it and distrust it.
To see what affect this cacophony of information has on democracy, News Decoder convened two experts in journalism and three high school students for our most recent Decoder Dialogue, a monthly live video conference series. And we posed this question: In defending democracy, does journalism matter?
“A healthy mainstream press is definitely one of the pillars of democracy because it gives people the hard naked truth in order to be able to make informed decisions,” said Alexandru Ciocan, the editor-in-chief of Gen, revistă, a youth-produced magazine in Romania. “You have to be correctly informed and you have to have a multitude of perspectives and opinions and a good, healthy press does that.”
A question of access and trust
But do people today have access to a healthy mainstream press and do they trust the information they find in the digital universe? If not, what does that say about the health of democracies around the world?
Helen Womack has reported from Moscow for Reuters, The Independent, The Times and the Fairfax newspapers of Australia. She pointed out that one-fifth of young people in the United Kingdom are questioning whether democracy is better than dictatorship.
Breck DuPaul is a high school student from the United States currently studying in France with School Year Abroad. He sees a growing distrust of the mainstream media among his peers because they don’t see it as useful. “It is creating anger and disagreement that doesn’t lead to change and doesn’t create change for the future,” he said. “It is inciting conversations that aren’t necessarily productive.”
He said that it is depressing to scroll through news and just read about horrific things happening around the world. “I have a friend who tells me he doesn’t read the news or follow politics because there is nothing he can do to change anything,” DuPaul said. “Why would he use his energy and time worrying about something he can’t change?”
Where people get their news
Sophie Kapshtica is also studying in France with School Year Abroad. She said that many of her friends get information from TikTok, Instagram and other social media sites, but those sites just give highlights of the news. “It doesn’t really give you the full story,” she said. “I think [mainstream news] gives you so many different ideas and options when you have a larger perspective and are actually searching for more information.”
But that seems to require people to search out credible sources that provide context to complex stories. “I think a lot of people really don’t invest time, especially at my age, into reading the news and really being well-educated and well-versed into different issues,” she said.
Arya Sharma is a student at VIBGYOR High School in India. She said that it wasn’t until her parents pushed her that she started reading the news. “And when I started reading the newspaper I actually found it very interesting to learn about different events,” she said. “Because as an average reader myself it felt like a storybook to me learning about different views, different things that are happening around the world. So I’d like to think of myself as well informed.”
Even so, Sharma said she doesn’t seek out news outlets that present opposing views to the ones she holds. “But if I come across them I enjoy reading,” Sharma said. “It is fun to know other people’s perspectives and how they view things because it can be drastically different to how you view things and I think it can help you grow as a person.”
The panelists seemed to agree that too many people distrust the information the news media presents.
The consequences of distrust
Womack, now based in Budapest, Hungary, said distrust isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “It is skepticism isn’t it?” she said. “But the way that politicians are now cynically undermining the media is a really dangerous thing.”
She said that one of the key points of propaganda in Russia is not to convince people that they are wrong, but to just create confusion. “To make you so confused that you want to give up,” Womack said.
The level of distrust in the media can have real consequences. Ciocan said that became clear in the last elections in Romania. “There was a ‘distrust vote,’” he said. “[Young people] voted in anger and that among other things was a sign of their distrust and their distancing from traditional media.”
To combat this distrust and confusion and hopelessness you have to properly educate people in the school system, he said.
“It all boils down to the education system, which in Romania I’m sorry to say is not great,” Ciocan said. “A well-educated public with strong basis of critical thinking can at least try to make sense of all this information.”
Three questions to consider:
1. How are democracy and journalism connected?
2. Why is some skepticism of information a good thing?
3. How can you become a better informed citizen of your country?
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.