News for the powerful and privileged: how misrepresentation and underrepresentation of disadvantaged communities undermine their trust in news

There is no single trust problem, and therefore there is no single trust solution. This point has been a common refrain over the course of the past two and a half years of the Reuters Institute Trust in News Project. As audiences often have different reasons underlying their scepticism and distrust, news organisations that seek to maintain and rebuild trust must first grapple with whose trust they seek to engender and consider the distinct trade-offs associated with catering to different segments of the public (Toff et al. 2020; Toff et al. 2021a). It is not possible to be trusted by all people, nor are all people looking for journalists to serve them and their communities in the same ways, even if in the abstract there are many shared values around what constitutes trustworthy journalism.

This lesson was at the forefront of our minds as we set out in this study to consider the distinct perspectives of audiences who are particularly underrepresented in news coverage and/or hail from historically marginalised groups. Previous survey research, including our own, has shown differences in trust levels and perceptions of fairness in some places based on particular demographic variables, such as race (or caste in India), gender, social class, and age (Newman et al. 2021; Toff et al. 2021c). However, there are limitations to using survey data to understand many of these smaller subsamples. To gain a more granular understanding of what these differences mean and how they may relate to other factors or experiences, qualitative methods are particularly useful.