Who do we trust?

Shortly after Snowden revealed himself as the whistle-blower behind the 2013 NSA leaks, Glenn Greenwald wrote 15 June 2013 in The Guardian that “the purpose of whistleblowing is to expose secret and wrongful acts by those in power in order to enable reform. A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark and informing the public of those acts.” I strongly believe that Greenwald’s comment speaks broadly to the idea of journalism as a social phenomenon of trust and transparency. Journalism in the era of leaks and networked media has definitely become a profession of trust, in which actors and the system itself must perform with trust being both a prerequisite for action as well as a constraint.

It has become a normal reality that journalists and their sources can be targets in an effort to hunt down whistle-blowers. The reason? Journalists often have to reveal uncomfortable truths, about politics, about national security, and sometimes about topics that are barred from entering spheres of debate. Often times, as EuroNews reports, we do not want to trust journalists because we do not want to face reality. For example, today the so-called LuxLeaks trial opened in Luxembourg City, in which three journalists will be evaluated for their role in leaking information about international tax deals for multinational European corporations. Many Europeans see the exposure of the deals as an important part of cleaning up the business world, but find that the trial affronts press freedoms. In this sense, the risks that the LuxLeaks journalists took to expose these secret deals is communicated as exacerbating the lack of trust between government and the press, thus damaging the already-difficult relationship between national security and how much the public should know.

GIGAOM notes that it is, indeed, difficult to identify something as “trustworthy.” On the one hand, in Quartz, Akshat Rathi discusses the issue of “why [people] cannot trust journalism,” drawing comparisons to the separate fields of journalism and science. Rathi argues that journalists are often not trusted because it is difficult to provide “truths,” unlike in science. On the other hand, some people suggest that we turn to trust journalists because we have lost trust in everything/everyone else, as a Canadian survey recently revealed. Others, like Wired, suggest that the degree of trust in journalism and news outlets is dependent upon the style of reporting. For example, ICIJ Director Gerad Ryle called the Panama Papers a solid trust effort on the part of everyone involved, demonstrating a shift in reporting style and collaboration: “We’re not WikiLeaks. We’re trying to show that journalism can be done responsibly.” Ultimately, I think that trust, like journalism itself, is a process of (re)construction. Who we are willing to trust says a lot not only about ourselves, but also about what we are willing to risk in trusting that person/outlet.