Journalists, Sources, and Credibility

New Perspectives

Bob Franklin, Matt Carlson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136858321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

This volume revisits what we know about the relationship between journalists and their sources. By asking new questions, employing novel methodologies, and confronting sweeping changes to journalism and media, the contributors reinvigorate the conversation about who gets to speak through the news. It challenges established thinking about how journalists use sources, how sources influence journalists, and how these patterns relate to the power to represent the world to news audiences.

Useful to both newcomers and scholars familiar with the topic, the chapters bring together leading journalism scholars from across the globe. Through a variety of methods, including surveys, interviews, content analysis, case studies and newsroom observations, the chapters shed light on attitudes and practices in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Belgium and Israel.

Special attention is paid to the changing context of newswork. Shrinking newsgathering resources coupled with a growth in public relations activities have altered the source-journalist dynamic in recent years. At the same time, the rise of networked digital technologies has altered the barriers between journalists and news consumers, leading to unique forms of news with different approaches to sourcing. As the media world continues to change, this volume offers a timely reevaluation of news sources.

Part I
Credibility, Transparency and Diversity

1
Source Credibility as a Journalistic Work Tool

Zvi Reich

One key determinant of who becomes a news source and thus acquires voice and involvement in news content is the extent to which different agents are perceived by journalists as credible (Detjen et al., 2000; Gans, 1979; Goldenberg, 1975). Source credibility in journalism, that is always a perceived phenomenon (hence hereinafter “credibility” is used to mean “perceived credibility”), extends far beyond the believability of one actor or another, as human agents stand behind virtually all news (Reich, 2009; Sigal, 1986; Strömbäck and Nord, 2005) and credibility is interwoven into the wider logic of news making, outlining the borderline between versions and facts, trust and skepticism, objectivity and bias, high exposure and news deprivation (Cottle, 2000; Reich 2009; Schudson, 2001).

Journalists ranked credibility as the most influential factor in source selection, followed by source accessibility and time pressure (Powers and Fico, 1994), describing it as a factor that aids in determining whether the journalist or sources control the story (Altheide, 1978).

Despite its importance, however, very limited research attention has been devoted to source credibility in journalism (Tsfati, 2008). Most of the so-called “plentiful” (Self, 1996, p. 421) credibility literature focuses on audiences and their perceptions of sources, media and messages (Gaziano and McGrath, 1986; Johnson and Kaya, 2000; Rouner, 2008, pp.1040–1041; Wanta and Hu, 1994). The applicability of these studies to journalism may be limited. Journalists are probably unique administrators of doubts, as practitioners who constantly juggle between losing time when being over-suspicious and losing face (and sometimes even losing their jobs) when being under-suspicious. They are more intensive and proficient judges of credibility than lay-people. For journalists, credibility is a major professional value and a central tenet of codes of ethics, playing a quadruple role “as a goal, a tool, an asset and a rationale behind most professional creeds” (Tsfati, 2008, p. 2598). From the point of view of their sources, journalists perform a triple role as an audience, medium and gatekeeper (Aronoff, 1975, p. 45).

Even the minority of studies that have focused on journalists have asked them to rank hypothetical, generic and decontextualized types of sources; such as senior officials, public relations practitioners, commercial or academic sources; while in real-life situations journalists encounter specific personae who offer specific information under specific contexts of newsworthiness, competition, risk of error and the availability of time, resources and accessibility, that are required for cross-checking suspected sources or details in advance. In some studies, journalists were even asked to rank the credibility of entire organizations (Yoon, 2005) or clusters of sources (Detjen et al., 2000; Powers and Fico, 1994; Rouner, Slater, and Buddenbaum 1999), each of which may incorporate, side by side, notorious liars and reputable truth tellers.

The purpose of this chapter is to elicit the role of source credibility in journalism, demonstrating how news reporters actually assess the credibility of specific news sources in a specific sample of items. Furthermore, it attempts to detect productive associations between credibility and other aspects of newswork: source map structure, patterns of journalistic treatment of sources with different levels of perceived credibility and the characteristics of more versus less credible sources.

Data were gleaned in a series of face-to-face reconstruction interviews in which reporters ranked, contact by contact, the credibility of a sample of 1,840 news sources on which they had relied recently, testing several generalizations suggested in the literature.

CREDIBILITY AND NEWSWORK

Although interest in source credibility is at least as ancient as Greek philosophy (Self, 1996), modern credibility studies only began to appear during the 1940s. The topic soon became one of the most widely studied concepts in communication (Rouner, 2008), with hundreds of published empirical studies (Metzger et al., 2003). Nevertheless, in the specific context of journalism, credibility studies remain scarce (Flynn, 2002; Tsfati, 2008).

Most research outside journalism, beginning with interest in propaganda (Rouner, 2008; Self, 1996), focuses on audiences as addressees of different speakers, writers, messages and media (Metzger et al., 2003; Rouner, 2008; Self, 1996). The applicability of this rich body of research to the specific context of journalism is probably limited.

In the specific context of journalism, credibility is perceived as having a “visceral nature,” as “an assumption rather than a judgment to be made about a source [ … ] not a quality inherent in a source but instead … levied onto a source by the media” (Dunwoody and Ryan, 1987, p. 21). Categorizations of source credibility among journalists are based on cognitive biases (Stocking and Gross, 1989, cited by Self, p. 429) and their criteria are debated by journalists, academics (Tsfati, 2008, p. 2597) and other professionals (Salomone et al., 1990).

Critical approaches assert that “[ … ] it is style and presentation rather than truthful information which gives some sources more control over their messages. In this context, journalistic truth is but a by-product of familiarity and legitimacy” (Altheide, 1978, p. 375).

Source credibility is seen by its critics as a “higher order resource” of organizations and institutions, resulting “in part from other resources such as size, cohesion, knowledge, intensity of feeling and perhaps money or votes” (Goldenberg, 1975, p. 46).

Three main aspects of source credibility and journalism may be found in the literature: Structural, practical and contextual, each of which will be accompanied by a specific research question.

Structural Aspects

Common wisdom asserts that journalists rely heavily on credible (Manning, 2001) and familiar sources (Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978) and that familiarity and credibility are somehow associated (Altheide, 1978; Gans, 1979; Yoon, 2005). This association is consequential, because it may structure the actual mix of sources according to their “hierarchy of credibility” (Becker, 1970), resulting in a highly disputed discrimination of “news access” (Cottle, 2000; Goldenberg, 1975; Hall et al., 1978; Manning, 2001) in which “upper”-class sources receive regular coverage and whose “distrust must be earned” whereas “lower”-class sources, constantly deprived of coverage, are considered “illegitimate until proven innocent” (Altheide, 1978).

Against this backdrop, we may formalize the first research question:

RQ 1: To what extent do journalists consider their sources credible and rely on them regularly and how strong are the associations between regular use and credibility?

Practical Aspects

In its basic function, source credibility is a major criterion for source selection (Gans, 1979; Goldenberg, 1975; Manning, 2001) in a manner that “avoid[s] engaging in arduous investigations to find evidence for the trustworthiness of a specific source” (Jackob, 2008, p. 1045). According to this perspective, journalists apply source credibility as an efficiency measure: the more credible the source, the less strict the attendant production practices (Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979). Strictness, in this case, refers to a set of journalistic practices, including cross checking, relying on additional sources (not necessarily for corroboration of previous information) and less anonymity in an attempt to delegate some responsibility to the attributed source (Allan, 1999). A fourth impact is the allocation of less item space for less credible sources—an inevitable result of using more sources and applying more cross checking. This association is valuable not only because it was not discovered in previous studies (Flynn, 2002; Yoon, 2005) but primarily because it may help translate an abstract and evasive act of news judgment, carried out on the go, into a measurable output, suggesting a second research question:

RQ 2: To what extent are less credible sources treated with stricter sourcing practices than others, namely fewer additional sources per item, less cross checking and less source anonymity?

As an efficiency measure, source credibility fits the constraints of journalism, in which reporters cannot afford to follow their doubts too far (Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978). However, they cannot overextend their efficiency considerations either, as they are employees of brands that have to preserve their own credibility (Roshco, 1975; Schudson, 2003) and whose blunders, flaws, biases, and libels are published promptly and extensively under their own names (Tuchman, 1978; Reich, forthcoming). Hence source work may be perceived as a constant effort to avoid both a prohibitive workload of excessive distrust and reckless trust of unreliable sources.

Contextual Aspects

According to the literature, journalists’ perception of source credibility is associated with various source traits, such as role (e.g., senior source or public relations practitioner), sector in society (e.g., political or private sector), resources and symbolic assets and even the communication channels through which information is obtained (Gitlin, 1980; Goldenberg, 1975; Reich 2009; Schlesinger, 1990). Apparently, the most trusted sources are public officials, especially senior ones (Fishman, 1980; Machin and Niblock, 2006; Sigal, 1986), followed by not-for-profit and academic sources and medical experts (Becker, 1970; Cottle, 2000; Detjen, 2000; Rouner, 2008; Yoon, 2005). Less credibility is ascribed to business sector sources, PR practitioners, politicians and ordinary citizens (Gans, 1979; Ericson, Baranek and Chan, 1989; Machin and Niblock, 2006).

Although reliance on other persons had become the dominant method for obtaining news (Sigal, 1986; Strömbäck and Nord, 2005), the most credible sources are probably none other than … journalists themselves when relying on their own eyewitness reports. This practice is not only more immune to bias, but is also perceived as professionally and ethically superior (Christopher, 1998; Russell, 1999; Zelizer, 1990), leading to the third research question:

RQ 3: To what extent is credibility associated with certain source characteristics: roles, sectors in society and the channels through which they are communicated?

Methodology

The present study elicits the role played by source credibility in shaping the public news diet using face-to-face reconstruction interviews. This method allows for contact-by-contact testing of the credibility assigned to a given sample of sources by a specific group of reporters who relied on them recently. It enables coverage of a representative sample of news items that were subsequently published or aired, based on detailed testimonies of the reporters who authored them.

The reconstruction interview method proved its ability to identify the contributions of different entities to the published news (Bustos, 2008; Reich 2006, 2009) and was adopted here because of the shortcomings of traditional methods in the conte...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Journalism
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Introduction
• Part I Credibility, Transparency and Diversity
• Part II Entrenched Practices, Entrenched Sources
• Part III Citizens and Sourcing
• Contributors
• Index