Do People Consume the News they Trust?

Abstract

It is reasonable to expect trusted news organizations to have more engaged users. However, given the lowest levels of trust in media and the several intermediaries involved in digital news consumption, recent studies posit that trust and usage may not be related. We argue that while trust may not relate to overall news usage, given that much of it is incidental, but it could still explain intentional usage. We correlated passively metered usage from digital trace data on 35 national news outlets in the US with their trustworthiness from a nationally representative survey, for three discrete months. We find no association between trust and overall user engagement, but a positive relationship between trustworthiness and direct visits, the latter a measure of intentional usage. These relationships held for outlets despite their partisan leanings, multi-platform presence and their mainstream nature.

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