Winning Trust with Transparency

Maddie Valentine 

 mv598217@ohio.edu

 

It's a fact of life that just as fall turns into winter, children grow into adults and the newest iPhone quickly becomes the oldest. Similarly, social media and the way people interact across internet platforms, change over the years. 

When Twitter was first thrust into the stratosphere, only the "young and hip" used the app to tweet what they had for breakfast or complain about how their Starbucks barista got their order wrong for the third time that month. 

However, if anyone took a quick glance at the platform today, you would see tweets from just about anyone like famous actors and even local state representatives. 

Picture source: Kacper Pempe, Reuters

What began as a fun way to interact with friends turned into one of the biggest sites for sharing and communicating information over the internet. So it's no surprise that platforms, like Twitter, have become almost a required aspect of being a working journalist in today's social climate. 

But the problem with mixing work with social media is that there is no editor checking over your work or supervisor approving messages. Once an account has been used in a professional manner, it has become by proxy, a representation of the company you work for, meaning the words you put out on social media directly reflects your company and work as a whole. 

For a journalist, this can be a tough job to handle. 

There is now more than ever, a constant cry for unbiased news reporting and disillusionment with media companies from the public. A journalist should not be biased in their reporting any way, shape or form, and keep their personal feelings to themselves.

So when a journalist calls a tweet of Trump's racist on Twitter, does that automatically make them biased and untrustworthy? Many believe, yes. Recently, the New York Times and Washington Post revised their social media policies so that reporters cannot post anything that could be considered taking a political side or stance.

The problem, however, isn't that a journalist voicing their opinions makes them unfair when reporting but it makes them less trustworthy in the eyes of the public.

So if the problem is trust between journalists and the public, how can that be fixed? Is it through restricting the voices of journalists through regulations or allowing a more transparent, open approach? 

A major tenet in the SPJ's code of ethics is to, "Be Accountable and Transparent." This means to have an open dialogue with the audience about the way stories were written and why they were written that way. Admit when mistakes were made and own up to them. 

By limiting what a journalist is able to say takes away some of that open conversation with readers and puts a metaphorical wall between the two; making true and free conversation impossible. 

An example of what this transparency could look like was done by the Jefferson City News Tribune who in an effort to show their audience how they put effort into being unbiased, gave a list of the same story covered by other news outlets, showing the different viewpoints in reporting. 

This is how the media will win back the trust of the public, not by restricting but by sharing ideas and processes.