Tag Archives: trust

Ramifications of Decline of Trust in Media

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SkepticJournalists have historically performed a watchdog function over the three main branches of government. The executive, judicial and legislative branches check the power of each other. Journalists watch over them all on behalf of the public and provide an additional check … or so the theory goes.

A 2012 poll by Gallup, Media Use and Evaluation, showed that trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately has reached an all time low. It peaked  in 1976, the year after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency following the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate Scandal, but as the Gallup chart below shows, trust has been declining since then.

Gallup concluded:

“This is particularly consequential at a time when Americans need to rely on the media to learn about the platforms and perspectives of the two candidates vying to lead the country for the next four years.”

“Americans’ high level of distrust in the media poses a challenge to democracy and to creating a fully engaged citizenry. Media sources must clearly do more to earn the trust of Americans, the majority of whom see the media as biased one way or the other.”

In this second, separate survey that you can see by following the link above, Gallup also  found that 60 percent of Americans see the media as biased, with 47% saying the media are too liberal and 13% saying they are too conservative. Republicans trust news media least, but curiously, Gallup found that they pay the most attention to national news.

My Take

For the moment, the lack of trust in news media seems to have caused people to become more vigilant rather than less engaged. However, one wonders when the switch will flip.

When people start to tune out, we are on the most slippery of slopes. We will lose the ultimate check-and-balance in society – an informed electorate.

Erosion of Trust in Information Fosters Polarization in Politics

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A familiar thread running through many of these posts is trust. A good friend who is a very successful businessman once told me that “If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a business.” I have come to believe that saying with all my heart and soul. I think every copywriter, reporter and CEO should have it tattooed on his or her navel.

Trust is the currency of communication.

TrustWhen we don’t trust the information someone is sending us, we don’t trust him, her or them. This merely seeks to divide us. We may win elections or business deals with bad information, but we lose something larger – the relationships upon which long-term success is built.

Recent surveys indicate that the credibility of advertising and media (Pew, Gallup, Neiesen, Lab42 studies) is severely eroding. Both have fallen to about 25 percent. Said another way, three in four people automatically discount what they read, see or hear through the media, whether it’s programming, news, or advertising. By the way, that also is roughly the same percentage of people who falsify information on social media profiles.

How can we restore trust?

A good place to start is over in that far corner of the ring called truth and fairness. If you don’t believe “truth” is obtainable because it is too subjective, then let’s strive for fairness and balance.

I asked several friends, “what would you do to restore trust in the sources of information?” Here are some of the suggestions:

  1. Stop exaggerating to make your point. Yes, exaggeration sometimes gets attention. But it undermines acceptance.
  2. Acknowledge limitations of your information or knowledge.
  3. Be honest, open and fair. Don’t try to twist the facts to make a point. Selective regurgitation is not the way to get the gist of something right.
  4. Don’t withhold information that materially changes the meaning of something.
  5. Support your case with specifics. But don’t misrepresent their meaning to suit your ends. We’ve all seen too many election ads that take quotes out of context to twist the true meaning of what someone said. We’ve all seen too many people waving documents that purport to prove something is true when it is false.
  6. Cite original sources. Do your research. Don’t repeat rumors. And don’t just trust what a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend said. By the time something is filtered through a newspaper reporter who is quoted in a blog which is reposted in a tweet and then distributed in an email rant, the original meaning may have been lost. I had a conversation with my barber before the last election in which he claimed “Obama is a known communist.” Hmmmm. I thought he was a Democrat. So I asked the barber what made him think that. “Somebody wrote a book about it. Everyone knows it.” “What’s the name of the book?”  “I can’t remember.” “Well, can you tell me one thing he’s done that is communistic?” No response.
  7. Make it clear what is fact and what is your opinion of the facts.
  8. Acknowledge different sides of an argument and hold all sides to the same standard of truthfulness. Try to illuminate, not obfuscate. Nothing is more frustrating than when someone doesn’t acknowledge your point of view, but keeps spouting sound bites to make his or her point of view. This does nothing to advance the discussion, but leads to isolationism and gridlock.
  9. Don’t repeat falsehoods, even in jest. A surprising number of people get their news these days from “comedy news shows” that blur the distinction between fact and fantasy.
  10. Be suspicious of ad hominem attacks and avoid generalizations. Treat the other side with respect.

Counterfeiting the Currency of Communication

The partisan pursuit of self-interest often gets in the way of these principles. Unfortunately, when people cross these ethical lines, they undermine the trust that binds people together. People begin to trust only those that share their world view. Compromise is victimized. Politics become polarized. Winning arguments by counterfeiting the currency of communication is a prescription for disaster. The government won’t let people counterfeit its currency. Why do so many human beings willingly counterfeit their own?

How Context Impacts Interpretation

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WARNING: This image is NOT what most people assume it is. It is an example of how even the “literal” can “lie.” The context in which something appears can turn meaning around 180 degrees.

FatherDaugther

Copyright © 2013 Rehak Creative Services, Inc.

In the 1970s, I spent much of my spare time with a Nikon F2 wandering through a Chicago neighborhood called Uptown. It was a pretty rough neighborhood at the time – a cauldron of poor Hispanics, African-Americans, Whites who had migrated up from the South and (reportedly) the nation’s single largest concentration of American Indians. Gangs and poverty ruled the neighborhood., Bars, flop houses and halfway homes dotted the streets.

The Chicago Tribune published many of my photos, but refused to publish this one. I took it on a cold morning when I ducked inside a store to change rolls of film. As I closed the  camera, I turned and saw this pair staring at me. I immediately dropped to my knee and clicked off five frames with my motor drive as the Black man withdrew the cigarette from his mouth.

Eager to learn more about these two and to obtain model releases, I engaged them in conversation and found that my photo was NOT what it appeared to be. The man had adopted the girl after marrying her mother. Several days later, I brought prints from my negatives to the family as a gift. I met the mother and learned that she had been a single mom who moved to the city from West Virginia to find work. Instead, she found herself living on the streets, cold and hungry. The Black man had taken her and her daughter in, provided them with food and shelter, and eventually married the mother. It seemed to be a very loving, interracial family.

“What’s going on here?”

When the Tribune editors saw the image, their jaws dropped. “What’s going on here?” they asked. I told them the story, but they refused to publish the image even after they knew the story behind it. They feared “it would start a race war.”

For more than 35 years, the image remained unpublished until today. One of my clients, an African-American, saw it a few years ago and almost became physically ill from what the image implied. I told her the story behind it and we remained good friends, but the encounter taught me the editors had been right.

Sometimes even an unaltered documentary image can create a false impression. Because of the social context in which we live, most people see this as pimp and child prostitute, not as loving father and adopted daughter. What was your first impression? Did you leap to the wrong conclusion? Most people do. They see it within a cultural context that is filled with racial distrust. They see the hat. They see the gleam in the man’s eye, the smile on his lips, the leer on the young girl’s face, and they assume the worst.

I learned a powerful lesson from this image. Words and images taken out of context can misrepresent the true meaning of something innocent. They can inflame the reader, fuel prejudice, and ultimately harm society. I publish this example, not to do any of those things, but in the hope that it will teach others how images can mislead.

Sometimes, the reader’s past causes him/her to misinterpret the meaning. Sometimes, people simply jump to the wrong conclusion because of personal experience, prejudice or media conditioning. And sometimes, “authors” deliberately mislead readers by withholding information that would allow them to interpret things properly. When that happens, there’s no way readers can get to the truth.

Ramifications of Internet Anonymity

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One of the signature characteristics of the Internet is anonymity. The widespread use of screen names and the difficulty of verifying the identities behind them makes the Internet a playground for frauds, cheats, and predators.

Of course, there are plenty of honest people on the Internet, too. The Internet has opened up new markets, created global awareness on a scale never seen in history, and boosted the productivity of businesses worldwide.

My point is that anonymous communications from the dark side of humanity taint the credibility of the medium and poison the waters for the rest of us. They undermine people who use the Internet for good and legitimate purposes. There don’t seem to be many ways to stop the hoaxsters.

In 2006, a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meier committed suicide after a case of cyber-bullying on a popular social networking site. Allegedly, the mother of a rival girl at Megan’s school created an account on the site for a fictitious boy named Josh. Her intent allegedly was to get Megan to reveal details about herself that could later be used to humiliate Megan. The ensuing cyber-bullying had tragic consequences. Megan hung herself. Numerous suicides related to cyber-bulling have been reported since.

Internet anonymity does not always contribute to such tragic consequences. Some cases are simply highly embarrassing.

This month, Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o, who led the Fighting Irish to the BCS championship game this year and finished second for the Heisman Trophy, said in a statement that he fell in love with a girl online last year who turned out not to be real. Te’o said during the season that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukemia in September on the same day Te’o’s grandmother died, triggering an outpouring of support for Te’o at Notre Dame and in the media. All the details are still not clear, but the story is making national headlines.

Elaborate and highly publicized hoaxes such as these undermine the credibility of the medium. I’ve often likened the Internet of today to the Wild West. Pretty much anything goes.

This is a shame. At a time when people trust advertising less and the credibility of traditional news sources has trended down for more than a decade, who can you trust?

Marketers have begun to rely on online reviews as references, but many of those can’t be trusted either. My company has been approached by others to get us to create fictitious product reviews favoring one company and slamming its competitors. Even though the business would have been lucrative and easy, we turned it down.

How many times have those online reviews sucked me in? Last week, I upgraded the security system at my office to one that supposedly allowed me to monitor my cameras over the Internet. The system had glowing 5-star reviews online, yet when I loaded the app on my iPhone and iPad, it was very buggy. It works only about half the time for reasons I cannot understand.

Kinda makes one wonder about the integrity of that online review process!

 

Credibility of Advertising

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More than three in four consumers say most of the claims that brands make in advertisements are exaggerated, according to a study by Lab42.

Specifically, among surveyed consumers, 57.4% say advertising claims are “somewhat exaggerated,” and 19.0% say they are “very exaggerated,” Lab42 reported.

Only 2.8% of consumers surveyed say the claims in various ads are very accurate. For the full report, click here.

How did we come to this sad, sorry state of affairs? How did a whole industry undermine its own credibility without raising alarms? Here’s my personal take. The advertising industry I joined as a young man (at Leo Burnett in Chicago in 1972) was much different than the industry today. It seemed every commercial I wrote was scrupulously reviewed by agency lawyers, industry associations, and government regulators. Likewise, research ruled.

Commercials were tested, refined and retested in animatic form before production. Then commercials were tested again in finished form after production. Commercials were more trusted then and felt more compelling. They worked. Even clients believed … in the process.

Then during the Eighties, creatives revolted. They felt straight-jacketed.  They argued that:

  • Research forced everything into the same expected mold.
  • Lawyers sapped the fun out of commercials.
  • Advertising was failing to differentiate brands and make them stand out.
  • People didn’t watch TV to look at the ads; they watched it to be entertained.
  • Advertising needed to be more entertaining to succeed.

At that point, the race for eyeballs had begun. The creative development process was more about eye-candy. Writers and art directors argued that if people weren’t watching, there was no way the commercial could succeed. Of course, they were right.

But that logic contained several fatal flaws:

  • It assumed that people weren’t attending to commercials.
  • Gaining attention is only the first battle for customers’ hearts.
  • Unless advertising also manages to convert that awareness into interest and preference, it has failed.

While the Nineties were certainly a fun period to be in advertising, the industry was sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The eye-candy theorists failed to realize the devastation that unregulated, unpersuasive advertising would wreak on the industry.

Today, that eye-candy leaves many with a bad aftertaste. Perhaps it’s time for the pendulum to begin switching back. Better yet, perhaps it’s time for agencies to evolve to a higher level and to understand some basic truths.

In many cases, advertising makes people aware, but fails to gain interest. Therefore, prospects don’t seriously consider the client’s product or service. Said another way,  prospects don’t put the client on their shopping lists.