Exploring Trust in Partisan Media: Podcasts & the Rejection of Objectivity

• In Event: Partisanship in the Media

Abstract

There is a growing urgency in news media regarding decreasing levels of public trust. The crisis arises from a “perfect storm of economic, technological and social change” brought on by (amongst others) the rise of the Internet, the undermining of traditional news revenues, falling political participation and increasing political polarization. Questions of media trust have traditionally looked at the relationships between consumers and so-called “mainstream” media (Jones, 2004; Ladd, 2011; Lee, 2010). With a blurring of the lines between “mainstream” and “alternative” media sources, and a weaponization of the term “mainstream”, it is no longer sufficient to conceive of legacy, institutionalized, “mainstream” outlets as the totality of media. Furthermore, technological advancements have brought new forms of news media to the fore, notably news media apps and podcasts. Despite their growing popularity, political podcasts has thus far received little academic attention. Nonetheless, parallel to the previous dominance of talk radio, podcasts are increasingly becoming crucial to modern news diets. Indeed, Apple’s Podcast platform reported that over 50 billion podcasts have been downloaded since its launch in 2005, and that, as of March 2018, it now hosts over 525,000 active shows with more than 18.5 million episodes available (Locker, 2018). Novel news formats, embracing alternative economic models, have further complicated consumers’ assessments of trust in “news media” by adding new players, and new modes of consumption, into news diets. It is therefore pertinent, in exploring issues of trust and the mechanisms that underpin it, to consider “news media” outside of the traditional mainstream conceptions and thus explore new players—and the consumers that support them—as a way to question how trusting relationships between consumers and producers exist within a hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013).

This paper therefore extends knowledge of trust in news media by concentrating analysis on an as yet under-researched source of political news—political podcasts. Moreover, this paper looks to disentangle threads of current research in news media trust by examining the interrelationships between notions of trust, partisanship, media bias and journalistic objectivity. Using in-person and phone interviews with over 100 fans of political podcasts across the partisan spectrum (notably Crooked Media, Ricochet.com and No Agenda), we explore why consumers seek out partisan online news sources, the relationships they see between podcasts and mainstream news outlets and question what credibility markers are important in developing trust in this new medium. Analysis across the partisan divide reveals divergence between said credibility markers—with right-leaning partisans trusting podcast content that is not backed by mainstream media sources and left-leaning partisans requiring confirmation of the information they receive by more mainstream news sources. Early analysis similarly reveals differences between right- and left-leaning podcast listeners over the motivations for seeking out partisan podcasts. Right-leaning consumers more often point to necessity as a driving factor, highlighting distrust in the information provision of mainstream media, whereas left-leaning consumers more often described their motivations for listening as driven by existent parasocial relationships with the podcast hosts. Similarities can, however, be seen across the sample, particularly in relation to notions of journalistic objectivity. Consistent across the interview population is a belief that mainstream media operates within an increasingly shallow and false framing of journalistic objectivity and that, instead, transparent partisan bias is actually a more preferable orientation for news media.

Analysis therefore highlights several key areas of interest to political communication and journalism, notably challenges to the core ideals of political journalism—objectivity, journalistic authority and institutional trust. However, the driving factors fuelling trust in partisan podcasts highlights several potential routes for strengthening trust in news media more broadly.

Author

• Rachel Elizabeth Moran, University of Southern California