• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, July 21, 2020

Reuters Institute out of the U.K. just released a comprehensive study looking at how people around the world are finding their news. There’s a lot here to unpack, so I’ll break it into pieces over a few columns.

Today, I’ll look at the 50,000-foot view, which can best be summarized as a dysfunctional relationship between our news sources and ourselves. And like most dysfunctional relationships, the culprit here is a lack of trust.

Before we dive in, we should spend some time looking at how the way we access news has changed over the last several years. 

Over my lifetime, we have trended in two general directions, toward fewer cognitively demanding news channels and destination-specific news sources. 

The most obvious shift has been away from print. According to Journalism.org and the Pew Research Center, the circulation of U.S. daily newspapers peaked around 1990, at about 62 and a half million. That’s one subscription for every four people in the country at that time. 

In 2018, it was projected that circulation had dropped more than 50%, to less than 30 million. That would have been one subscription for every 10 people. 

We were no longer reading our news in a non-digital format, which might have significant impact on our understanding of the news. I’ll return to this in another column, but for now, let’s just understand that our brain operates in a significantly different way when it’s reading, rather than watching or listening.

Up to the end of the last century, we generally trusted news destinations. Whether it was a daily newspaper like The New York Times, a news magazine like Time or a nightly network newscast, each offered one thing above all others: the news. And whether you agreed with these news sources or not, each had an editorial process that governed what news was shared. We had a loyalty to our chosen news destinations built on trust.

Over the past two decades, this trust has broken down due to one primary factor: our continuing use of social media. And that has dramatically shifted how we get our news.

In the U.S., three out of every four people use online sources to get their news. One in two use social media.  Those aged 18 to 24 are more than twice as likely to rely on social media. In the U.K., under-35-year-olds get more of their news from social media than any other source. 

Also, influencers have become a source of news, particularly among young people. In the U.S., a quarter of those 18 to 24 used Instagram as a source of news about COVID-19.

This means that most times, we’re getting our news through a social media lens. Let’s set aside for a moment the filtering and information veracity problems this introduces. Let’s just talk about intent for a moment.

I have talked extensively in the past about information foraging when it comes to search. When information is “patchy” and spread diversely, the brain has to make a quickly calculated guess about the patch where it’s most likely to find the information it’s looking for. With Information foraging, the intent we have frames everything that comes after.

In today’s digital world, information sources have disaggregated into profoundly patchy environments. We still go to news-first destinations like CNN or Fox News, but we also get much of our information about the world through our social media feeds. 

What was interesting about the Reuters report was that it was started before the pandemic, but the second part of the study was conducted during it. The study highlights a fascinating truth about our relationship with the news when it comes to trust.

The report shows that the majority of us don’t trust the news we get through social media — but most times, we’re okay with that. Less than 40% of people trust the news in general, and even when we pick a source, less than half of us trust that particular channel. 

Only 22% indicated they trust the news they see in social media. Yet half of us admit we use social media to get our news. The younger we are, the more reliant we are on social media for news. The fastest growing sources for news among all age groups — but especially those under 30 — are Instagram, SnapChat and WhatsApp.

Here’s another troubling fact that fell out of the study. Social platforms, especially Instagram and SnapChat, are dominated by influencers. That means that much of our news comes to us by way of celebrity influencers reposting it on their feed. This is a far cry from the editorial review process that used to act as a gatekeeper on our trusted news sources. 

So why do we continue to use news sources we admit we don’t trust? I suspect it may have to do with something called the Meaning Maintenance Model. Proposed in 2006 by Heine, Proulx and Vohs, the model speculates that a primary driver for us is to maintain our beliefs in how the world works. This is related to the sense-making loop I’ve also talked about in the past. We make sense of the world by first starting with the existing frame of what we believe to be true. If what we’re experiencing is significantly different from what we believe, we will update our frame to align with the new evidence.

What the Meaning Maintenance Model suggests is that we will go to great lengths to avoid updating our frame. It’s much easier just to find supposed evidence that supports our current beliefs. 

So, if our intent is to get news that supports our existing world view, social media is the perfect source. It’s algorithmically filtered to match our current frame. Even if we believe the information is suspect, it still comforts us to have our beliefs confirmed. This works well for news about politics, societal concerns and other ideologically polarized topics. 

We don’t like to admit this is the case. According to the Reuters study, 60% of us indicate we want news sources that are objective and not biased to any particular point of view. 

But this doesn’t jive with reality at all. As I wrote in a previous column, almost all mainstream news sources in the U.S. appear to have a significant bias to the right or left. If we’re talking about news that comes through social media channels, that bias is doubled down on. In practice, we are quite happy foraging from news sources that are biased, as long as that bias matches our own. 

But then something like COVID-19 comes along. Suddenly, we all have skin in the game in a very real and immediate way. Our information foraging intent changes and our minimum threshold for the reliability of our news sources goes way up. The Reuters study found that when it comes to sourcing COVID information, the most trusted sources are official sites of health and scientific organizations. The least trusted sources are random strangers, social media, and messaging apps. 

It requires some reading between the lines, but the Reuters study paints a troubling picture of the state of journalism and our relationship with it. Where we get our information directly impacts what we believe. And what we believe determines what we do. 

These are high stakes in an all-in game of survival.