The Detail: Kiwi journos tackling issue of distrust in NZ media

Two Kiwi news executives are a part of a very serious effort by journalists to try to claw back trust, not just in media institutions, but in society.

There's been a lot of discussion over recent years on the lack of public trust in institutions and the levels of disinformation.

The issues increasingly concern media organisations, as they watch the levels of trust in their work slide.

While the latest figures show that slide may have been arrested, that's a bit like saying the floodwaters have stopped rising - there's still a flood to clean up.

RNZ head of podcasts Tim Watkin is one media executive tasked with serious research to work out how to restore trust in journalism. He spent three months at the University of Glasgow's philosophy department and, on The Detail, shares what he's learnt and what he's telling RNZ's top brass needs to be done.

"If we actually can't trust the information around us, then it is potentially at least society-threatening, democracy-threatening, if not species-damaging," he says.

"This is really important stuff, so I think we have to fix this. We have to wrestle with it, we have to make it a priority."

This isn't the first era historically where trust in news outlets has been poor.

Watkin says, while we are stretching our trust muscles so thin these days, living our lives online and more disconnected from face-to-face transactions, journalism has been in this place before - and has won back trust.

"A hundred years ago... the propaganda out of World War I really had the public sceptical about what they could believe.

"That was the yellow press era, the rise of the tabloids in the UK and the US... [people were] just making stuff up, crazy stories."

Like this one.

"Through the late 1800s in particular and early 1900s, there was a real problem with trust in media. Journalism has often been unreliable, for most of its time in existence, but in the 20th century, journalism really buckled down and earnt trust.

"If you go back 50 years, the trust stats were way higher than they are now."

Watkin tells The Detail about the importance of a discipline of objectivity to show people journalists can take themselves out of the story to avoid bias - and the pressures that have tempted the media to push the boundaries between facts and opinion.

Richard Sutherland is a media executive who's worked in several big New Zealand newsrooms - he's currently back at RNZ, but later this year, he will travel to Estonia to do an MA in Disinformation and Societal Resilience.

"There's a lot of disinformation out there and what are you going to do?" he says. "Shrug your hands up and go, 'There's no point fighting back against it', or do you go, 'We've got to work out how do deal with this'.".

Why Estonia? Well, it's a western-facing country with an English-language course in combating disinformation, which is of special interest to the nation.

Sutherland says Estonia is an interesting case study in rebuilding a country from the ground up, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. There was a recognition in 2007 that Russia was flooding the place with disinformation and, as a result, a decision was made to teach school children media literacy from a very early age.

New Zealand, he suggests, perhaps doesn't see this issue through the same urgent lens, after being isolated by geography for years from war tearing down our cities or real sectarian violence. He says, while 100 years ago, that may have given us a degree of protection, it doesn't any more.

"The internet means the bad actor can be sitting 12,000 miles away and still have an impact on you. These guys know what it's like when things are bad, they don't want to go back.

"In the 1940s, there was a great mass deportation of people from Estonia and the other Baltic states. Tens of thousands of people were shipped off to Siberia and most of them never came back, so every family now has a story about a great uncle or a grandmother or a grandfather shipped off by the Russians to Siberia, and never returned.

"When you have that kind of theme running through your national story, it focuses your mind on, 'Well, we did that once, we didn't like it and we're not going back'.

"The disinformation piece the Estonians are working on is very much based on that."

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