 Welcome, everyone. Once again, let's talk about media and communication. In the words of this episode's speaker, Young Eon Moon, and colleagues, public trust in journalism has fallen very, very well. So today with Young, we dive into the world of trust and credibility, specifically exploring why the public tends to place greater trust in doctors than in journalists. Okay, so with Young, let's explore the findings of a study that compares public perceptions of those two institutions and uncover the factors that contribute to this disparity that we'll find out very, very soon. Young, welcome to our episode. Thank you for having me. Young, why have you and your colleagues decided to compare public trust in doctors and journalism? So actually, like the original idea came from my colleagues and Jake's and Christie's idea, and I joined the team later. And like from my end, my interest in this topic tied to my own personal and family background. Actually, my father is a medical doctor, and he's a pain management specialist, and he really likes to speak with me, and whenever he would come back from his work, he used to talk about what happened in his clinic that day, like from some good things to some frustration as a doctor treating his patients. And he used to say no matter how he explains things in detail with some scientific evidence, people would just like counter it with like something, no, no, no, but like some YouTuber or some blogger said like a blah, blah, blah. And they said that it's dangerous to get a shot like something like that. And he is in his 60s, so he has practiced medicine for 40 years, but he said that he never had such situation 20 or 30 years ago. But recently, he has been encountering such cases every day. So and I, and I feel like this is like a somewhat similar with what journalists are facing as information flows everywhere online and social media. So this is kind of like a why I became like interested in this topic. Yeah. The personal twist is very interesting here. What was so you were talking about new trends that that your father also mentioned. So what was specifically missing from the research that you wanted to address? I think so I think like, you know, when we think about like the public trust really carefully, it's not just about like something news media. I mean, like, I mean, of course, like we are all aware that like a public trust decline in is not a new thing. It has been declining since the 99 days or even longer than that. But what is particularly striking though is like how steep this decline has been in the last three years. And when we think about it really carefully, it's not just about news media. It's bigger than that. Like people don't trust the news media journalism. Absolutely. But you see a similar steep decline with politics, government, science or even bank system. So this is like a kind of our like a starting point, our point of our study. Like you might have come across research on why people are losing trust in news media or politics, government, respectively. But our team thinks that like all these declines are interconnected and it may actually represent a broader loss of trust in the entire system. So we found it really interesting to think about what the overall trust decline across multiple major institutions means and news media is just one of them. But as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been like much attempt to identify the reasons of public distrust in journalism by comparing with other institutions. So we believe that adopting such a comparative angle will help us to identify what are the key ingredients of public trust. In that way, we can think about the next step. Like what steps should institutions take to repair their relationship with the people. So that is the reason why we try to compare news media industry as well as other institutions. And what did you find with these comparisons? Yes, our major, I think like let me let me kick things off here. So as expected, there was a lack of trust in both healthcare and journalism, but people are generally tend to feel more trusting doctors than journalists. So this doesn't sound that surprising. They're interesting at all, right? Like anybody can expect it, right? But why do people trust doctors more? Because like what we found, according to our findings, first, people think doctors are experts in their field. Also, second, people can more frequently interact with individual doctors than they do with journalists. Makes sense, right? Like growing up, like we ran into medical doctors like a pediatrician often, but not so much with journalists. Not that much interaction with the journalists, right? So we identified to, we identified to, I'm sorry, I think I was a little lost here. No worries, no worries. Yeah. So we identified the two elements as ingredients of public trust, expertise and engagement. So then our question will be, what happens when there is less expertise and fewer engagement opportunities? So I think our title of our paper, it speaks itself like a journalist get fact checked while doctors can be the fact checkers. So before going to see a doctor, people searched online first about their symptoms, medicines, like side effects, something like that. And then ask doctors, like I found this information online. Is it really true? But for journalists, it's a totally different story. Like a people catch the news on TV or some abandoned places, then turn to the internet to fact check. Like it's kind of like a dual research. So like online is more experts than like a journalist. So there are more like a fancy terms like that may relate to this situation like a heuristic processing or systemic processing. But just in a simple term, we think journalists get fact checked while doctors are fact checkers. We believe like this title describes the situation more intuitively. That's very interesting. And as practical implications, practical implications of your study and to follow up on what you just said. So you indicate in the article that this might be practical implications. For example, investment in journalism, education and training, probably a public media organization that is publicly funded and article fact checking by social media companies before they are shared. So what can you tell us more about that practical implications of what you found? Yes. So when we think about like a how journalists have professionalized in American context, we talk about like norms like objectivity and independence like some do the norms like that. And these norms have developed by keeping a distance from the communities they cover. So for example, independence not only means like being separate from positions of power, but it also means maintaining a critical distance from the public and people so that they can report certain events objectively as a third party perspective. That's how journalists have maintains like a legitimacy by setting themselves apart from the public. So because news media has a long history of creating distance between the public and themselves, journalists approach rebuilding public trust by using emphasize, you know, like when journalists, I mean journalists approach to rebuilding public trust like a usually emphasizing like trust us because we are objective. We are independent. We are accountable. And such norms are known as like a journalist expertise. But like according to our findings like a trust isn't solely built on such norms of expertise, but in order to foster trust like expertise must be accompanied by meaningful engagement with their audiences in other words like in the journalism field like expertise and engagement are often considered as opposing values because expertise is built on keeping distance from the public while engagement is closing the distance. But to gain the public trust, journalists should aim for engagement not as a replacement for the expertise, but rather something that enhances their expertise. And like recently in fact like like many news outlets are putting a lot of efforts for engagement like using engagement in the metrics newsletter and making their journalists engage on social media or some newsrooms try public newsroom like where journalists and community members can meet to get to know each other and do some like a live Q&A session engaging in community events like of something like that. Yeah, so I think like it's such like balancing between the like a expertise as well as like a personal engagement. I think like, yeah, what is more important is to balance the expertise with deliberate effort to meet people where they are. Of course, makes sense. And your article is very clear about research limitations and I would like to know more about more venues for future research ahead of us. Yes, so we did like a big survey of like a thousand Americans but when it came to the interviews we only managed to like with interview with only 31 people. So yes, our sample size does not like represent all Americans and our interviews were only about an hour long. So it must be too short window to truly grasp what people think about like a two different professions comprehensively and you know like a qualitative research has like a pros and cons is really great too for getting the bigger picture some hidden unseen concepts. But if someone asked me how much or to what extent how engagement expertise affect trust in professionals well then like an answer for that is not yet known but actually our next paper which is like a currently underway is okay. We now know that like a specialized expertise and personal engagement are crucial. Now we are digging into when people lean more towards expertise when they believe engagement takes a spotlight. So we are diving deep with this question more quantitative way like using structure equation modeling. So stay tuned and stay for like a tip for our listeners. Yung, this has been a very clear and straight on point episode and I would like to ask you for a challenging thing that I always ask the speakers of this show is if you had to sum up your talk today in one or two sentences. What would it be personally? I like the doctors are fact checkers and journalists are fact check. That's what you have to share with us the punchline of this talk. I mean like even though like we began this research by focusing only to institution news media and healthcare but I believe like a two elements key elements that we identified like our expertise and engagements like I think like that can be applied to so many other areas such as government, company, schools and any other institutions. So if you are working one of the institution remember those like a two key elements and at the same time like when it comes to like a people who distrust them or who have complained about unpleasant and frustrating experiences in your institution. I would say that like a one possible strategy is to help that person distinguish between the system and the individuals working within that institution because like I would say that most of people used to conflate the two. So if they can like a distinguish between these like for example the healthcare system is flawed but my doctor is trustworthy. I think like that could be if they can like help them to distinguish the two then that could be a game changer. So providing opportunities for meaningful connection with the audience on a human level will bring about like some significant change if you want to gain trust of your audience. Perfect great episode young. Thank you very much. Thank you for our listeners and our viewers are watching us on YouTube. You can find all the resources all the materials of young and colleagues talk at let's talk about media and communication website. You can also listen to this episode wherever you get your podcast. You can subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter at Kojitatiu LTA.