Engagement + Expertise = Trust? Comparing Pathways to Credibility for Journalism and Healthcare

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review for “Engagement + Expertise = Trust? Comparing Pathways to Credibility for Journalism and Healthcare”

 

This paper represents a really interesting discussion about trust and how (1) journalism is struggling with it and (2) how it aligns with other professions, in particular, the healthcare industry. I’m glad to see that this work very much so extends the Moon et al. (2023) study that utilized in-depth interviews, thus allowing for more triangulation of the work and being able to see the connections more critically; it will help journalism studies scholars to think about how we and other professions can learn from one another to improve our practice (this was also discussed in a recent API white paper about the journalism/academic gap). This work provides a thoughtful addition to the engagement journalism world as well. It was a pleasure to read this, and I am grateful to be allowed to review this paper. I want to say upfront that I will not review the statistical tests and reasoning in this paper; it isn’t my area of expertise, and I do not want to give incorrect or inappropriate feedback related to that area. Instead, I chose to focus on the research outcomes, the argumentative approach, and the overarching readability of the article.

 

The opening of the paper provides a strong discussion of why engagement-based journalism practices matter but also offers the necessary and appropriate contradictions associated with the field. Much like any other type of journalism practice, engagement comes with strengths and shortfalls. I’m really glad one of the aims that the author(s) addresses is the presentational quality of a journalist, which is often tied to the concerns of the god-like term of objectivity. Engagement does wrestle with this really nuanced and ethical question of how should journalists present themselves to the public they serve. This is further developed within the literature review, which begins with the necessary conversation about credibility in journalism. Oftentimes, the idea of credibility has become conflated with the term trust – despite the two being measured differently and with very different outcomes for how folks interpret the meaning of them. Trust, especially when relative to audiences’ trust in journalism, can be easily misconstrued – especially compared to a more clear term in credibility. I’m really glad to see Thomas’s paper on paternalism in this discussion, especially the idea of paternalism isn’t always linked to credibility in the ways the author(s) posit it should. This extends to the necessary and thorough (!) discussion of seeing engagement journalism as an opposition to the more paternalistic tendencies of journalism. I also really appreciated the healthcare section of the literature review. While I am aware of their similar crisis in trust, I genuinely felt I learned something based on this section; I always appreciate that in a paper.

 

The discussion section builds on strong findings to explore the relationship between engagement, expertise, and trust in journalism and healthcare. The paper makes an important contribution here by highlighting how these dynamics differ across the two professions and offering insights into the challenges of trust-building. The moderation analysis, which shows that expertise is more critical when engagement is low, is fascinating. This finding raises important questions for journalists. How should they approach trust-building in environments where engagement is inherently limited? What strategies might help strengthen perceptions of expertise in spaces like national or digital newsrooms, where personal connections with audiences are often impractical? These practical applications could use further exploration to ground the analysis. The finding that engagement has a stronger impact on trust in healthcare than in journalism is a valuable addition to the field, although, as the conclusion notes – not unsurprising given the kinds of intimate relationships that healthcare professionals have compared to journalists.

 

The discussion attributes this difference to the healthcare sector’s reliance on personal, face-to-face interactions, but the systemic constraints in journalism need more attention. National and digital newsrooms, in particular, are often driven by scale, efficiency, and branding—factors limiting opportunities for meaningful audience interaction. Addressing these structural challenges and exploring potential solutions would strengthen the argument. Reflecting back on some of the literature here would be helpful, especially the works cited by Robinson and those by Belair-Gagnon. They echo this finding quite well and provide some examples of how this can be done. Oftentimes, this scale of the national press hinders the relationship journalists have at the local level – often seeing news consumers developing schemas of journalists that may not be correct at the local level. The “labor of trust” described in the paper is a fascinating idea, especially in comparison to community organizing. The parallels to healthcare’s personal engagement are compelling but feel underdeveloped. Journalists operate within a distinct framework in which audiences are more diffuse and engagement isn’t always direct. Exploring how journalists can adapt trust-building strategies to their unique circumstances without compromising their professional values, such as objectivity, would enhance this section.

 

The discussion briefly addresses parasocial relationships, particularly journalism’s historical dependence on one-sided audience interactions. This topic could be further explored, especially considering how social media has transformed the dynamics of engagement, or at least could be pointed out as being outside of the scope of the paper and an opportunity for future scholarship – which I believe the author(s) of this paper could own that study as well. Journalists now have tools to engage directly with their audiences, yet these interactions often blur professional boundaries. The tension between fostering trust through engagement and maintaining journalistic integrity requires deeper examination. The balance between engagement and expertise, central to the findings, opens critical pathways for considering the future of journalism. The analysis indicates that expertise alone isn’t sufficient for highly engaged audiences, highlighting potential gaps in how journalists are trained and how news organizations function. Should journalism education incorporate training in public engagement? What role should organizations play in fostering conditions for meaningful interaction without compromising the reporting process? These are important questions that the discussion could investigate more directly or at least acknowledge as an opportunity. Education, in particular, is where much more work can be done.

 

I would like to conclude by highlighting how much I enjoyed how the author(s) conclude. The idea of “imagined engagement” particularly stood out to me. I wonder if this is another pursuit of the author(s) or a hope of this research that this term becomes more solidified as a term worth explicating and studying in the future.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

Thank you for your thoughtful and constructive reviews of our article. We found your comments enormously helpful, and we have used them to revise the draft. We’ve highlighted the changes throughout the revision, and we describe the changes in detail below.

Reviewer 1

Reviewer 1’s review was extraordinarily kind! We truly appreciate their supportive comments and enthusiastic response to this article. They suggested we consider exploring further journalism’s historically one-sided audience interactions, or at least acknowledge that doing so is outside the scope of this paper. On page 2-3, we have addressed this by incorporating a discussion of journalism’s traditional one-to-many broadcast model, which historically limited audience participation and reinforced journalists’ authority through detachment and objectivity). This revision clarifies how these historical dynamics shaped perceptions of journalistic expertise and credibility, aligning with our broader discussion of engagement as an evolving challenge to legacy norms. 

Reviewer 1 also suggests we bring a number of interesting and important questions into the discussion, such as (1) Should journalism education incorporate training in public engagement? And (2) What role should organizations play in fostering conditions for meaningful interaction without compromising the reporting process? We agree these are really valuable questions to consider, and have incorporated them into the discussion section.

Reviewer 2 raised a number of concerns about our conceptualization of expertise. First, the reviewer pointed out that the way we discussed expertise did not align with the way we measured it. As the reviewer pointed out, our survey’s treatment of expertise is more about outcomes – particularly in the form of how audiences respond to news and/or healthcare – than it is about actual skills inherent among the journalists producing the news. This is an excellent point, and we’ve attempted to address it by changing our language surrounding expertise to “perceived expertise.” Our hope is this change makes it clearer to the reader that our aim with this study is to understand the relationship between perceptions of expertise and public trust. We’re very grateful for the reviewer for catching this, and believe this change makes the paper’s focus and contribution much clearer.

Reviewer 2 also points out that our narrow conception of expertise “misrepresents how professionals, including journalists, have historically gained authority (and in turn, people’s trust).” Referring to Carlson’s work on journalistic authority, the reviewer suggests we consider how “journalistic authority finds its root in the public discourse related to journalism that culturally defines it (via processes like boundary work, paradigm repair, etc.).” Reviewer 2 suggests that “what constitutes authority is always evolving, depending on what constructions the public accepts/rejects, not depending on what journalists actually do. ‘Expertise’ and ‘engagement’ are but two expressions of said construction, the latter increasingly destabilizing the former.”

We truly appreciate this point, and agree with the reviewer that we had taken a narrow approach to understanding how journalists have historically used the idea of their own expertise to build trust among the public. We have addressed this issue in the revision by (1) more meaningfully discussing the relationship between expertise, engagement, and authority in the literature review, and (2) using that discussion to articulate what we feel Reviewer 2 said very clearly in their review – that journalists’ authority is always changing depending on changes to public perceptions of journalism as much as (or perhaps even more than) changes to the actual practice of journalism. We have also taken up Reviewer 2’s suggestion to use that point to build a better bridge between journalism and healthcare, since, as they point out, how public trust in science (including medical sciences) is socially constructed in a similar way. Their observation that “both industries are legitimized through the social/cultural construction of their authority, not some inherent properties that their practitioners possess” is well taken, and working it into our revision not only helps us more accurately articulate our argument but, in shifting the focus from the actual practice of these professions to the perceptions of these professions, also strengthens the value of our findings. 

Reviewer 2’s other issue is with how we initially described our results in our findings and discussions sections. More specifically, Reviewer 2 observed that “these sections often seem to frame that people’s trust in news is affected by actual expertise/engagement levels (e.g. see lines 396-401)” rather than more accurately describing them as being affected by their perceptions of expertise and engagement. Again, we are grateful to the reviewer for noticing this disconnect between our findings and the way we described them, and have addressed it by again changing the language so that we now refer to perceptions of expertise and engagement when it comes to these professions. We also appreciate the reviewer’s observation that the suggestion for journalists to simply emulate doctors in their efforts to build trust falls a bit flat in light of our results. We have attempted to address this issue by more explicitly discussing the ways that journalists might attempt to fuse the ways in which they try to persuade the public of their expertise with their attempts to present themselves as more engaged with the public, as well as how those approaches might differ from what unfolds in healthcare. More importantly, our draft now ends with an additional drawing upon Carlson’s notion of journalistic authority. We conclude by using conceptual approach as a means to better understand the interplay between perceptions of engagement and expertise when it comes to trust and credibility for both journalism and healthcare.

We are truly grateful for these reviews, which we believe have resulted in a much stronger draft. We appreciate the reviewers’ constructive and detailed comments, and hope they find the revision acceptable.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a well-written and innovative paper based on solid empirical research.The research design is strong and I appreciate the practical implications of the findings. The parallel to healthcare is illustrative and important, and the author(s) did a good job explaining this parallel. I have two main concerns and I think this will become a highly valuable contribution to the field of journalism studies once they are addressed.

 

First, it strikes me that the literature review treats expertise as an objective property inherent to journalists, marked by the sum of their “specialized knowledge” (See lines 163-168, but this is also indicated in other places before methods). I have two issues with this. 

• First, this conception of expertise doesn’t square with the corresponding survey items in Table 1. The survey items seem to have more to do with the outcome of journalism (“provide best information” “protect democracy”) and its ethics (“highly professional” “stand up for society”) than any knowledge or skills possessed by journalists. 
• Second, and I think this is more important, this narrow conception of expertise misrepresents how professionals, including journalists, have historically gained authority (and in turn, people’s trust). I’d like to point to Matt Carlson’s work on journalistic authority and suggest that the author(s) attend to the discursive construction of authority that he has elaborated on. Seen in this light, journalistic authority finds its root in the public discourse related to journalism that culturally defines it (via processes like boundary work, paradigm repair, etc.). In other words, what constitutes authority is always evolving, depending on what constructions the public accepts/rejects, not depending on what journalists actually do. “Expertise” and “engagement” are but two expressions of said construction, the latter increasingly destabilizing the former. This constructionist view of expertise would benefit the paper in two ways: 1) because what matters is how the public perceive the news media (by accepting/rejecting certain constructions of authority), this validates their survey methodology as opposed to e.g. a design that measures actual expertise shown in journalism. 2) This lends itself to a stronger bridge between journalism and healthcare, because works in STS have extensively shown how public trust in science (including medical sciences) is socially constructed in a similar way (see e.g. Irwin & Wynne’s edited volume on the public reconstruction of science and technology). Both industries are legitimized through the social/cultural construction of their authority, not some inherent properties that their practitioners possess. 

 

My second concern is also about perception vs objective reality, this time related to results and discussion. Based on the research design, the independent variables are people’s perceived expertise/engagement, not actual levels of them, yet the writing in these sections often seems to frame that people’s trust in news is affected by actual expertise/engagement levels (e.g. see lines 396-401). The difference is more than rhetorical. One of the paper’s main takeaways — that journalists should be more like doctors in their engagement (more in-person interactions, etc.) — would make sense if they’re measuring actual levels of engagement (i.e. if more engaging doesn’t lead to more trust, then change the way to engage and emulate doctors). But the study’s finding is that even if someone “feels close to journalists” and thinks “journalists are like them,” they still wouldn’t necessarily trust the news. It’s not clear to me how “be more like doctors” would change this equation. It will hopefully increase the number of people who perceive the media to be engaging, but the study already proves that thinking media is engaging doesn’t lead to improved trust.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

Thank you for your thoughtful and constructive reviews of our article. We found your comments enormously helpful, and we have used them to revise the draft. We’ve highlighted the changes throughout the revision, and we describe the changes in detail below.

Reviewer 2 raised a number of concerns about our conceptualization of expertise. First, the reviewer pointed out that the way we discussed expertise did not align with the way we measured it. As the reviewer pointed out, our survey’s treatment of expertise is more about outcomes – particularly in the form of how audiences respond to news and/or healthcare – than it is about actual skills inherent among the journalists producing the news. This is an excellent point, and we’ve attempted to address it by changing our language surrounding expertise to “perceived expertise.” Our hope is this change makes it clearer to the reader that our aim with this study is to understand the relationship between perceptions of expertise and public trust. We’re very grateful for the reviewer for catching this, and believe this change makes the paper’s focus and contribution much clearer.

Reviewer 2 also points out that our narrow conception of expertise “misrepresents how professionals, including journalists, have historically gained authority (and in turn, people’s trust).” Referring to Carlson’s work on journalistic authority, the reviewer suggests we consider how “journalistic authority finds its root in the public discourse related to journalism that culturally defines it (via processes like boundary work, paradigm repair, etc.).” Reviewer 2 suggests that “what constitutes authority is always evolving, depending on what constructions the public accepts/rejects, not depending on what journalists actually do. ‘Expertise’ and ‘engagement’ are but two expressions of said construction, the latter increasingly destabilizing the former.”

We truly appreciate this point, and agree with the reviewer that we had taken a narrow approach to understanding how journalists have historically used the idea of their own expertise to build trust among the public. We have addressed this issue in the revision by (1) more meaningfully discussing the relationship between expertise, engagement, and authority in the literature review, and (2) using that discussion to articulate what we feel Reviewer 2 said very clearly in their review – that journalists’ authority is always changing depending on changes to public perceptions of journalism as much as (or perhaps even more than) changes to the actual practice of journalism. We have also taken up Reviewer 2’s suggestion to use that point to build a better bridge between journalism and healthcare, since, as they point out, how public trust in science (including medical sciences) is socially constructed in a similar way. Their observation that “both industries are legitimized through the social/cultural construction of their authority, not some inherent properties that their practitioners possess” is well taken, and working it into our revision not only helps us more accurately articulate our argument but, in shifting the focus from the actual practice of these professions to the perceptions of these professions, also strengthens the value of our findings. 

Reviewer 2’s other issue is with how we initially described our results in our findings and discussions sections. More specifically, Reviewer 2 observed that “these sections often seem to frame that people’s trust in news is affected by actual expertise/engagement levels (e.g. see lines 396-401)” rather than more accurately describing them as being affected by their perceptions of expertise and engagement. Again, we are grateful to the reviewer for noticing this disconnect between our findings and the way we described them, and have addressed it by again changing the language so that we now refer to perceptions of expertise and engagement when it comes to these professions. We also appreciate the reviewer’s observation that the suggestion for journalists to simply emulate doctors in their efforts to build trust falls a bit flat in light of our results. We have attempted to address this issue by more explicitly discussing the ways that journalists might attempt to fuse the ways in which they try to persuade the public of their expertise with their attempts to present themselves as more engaged with the public, as well as how those approaches might differ from what unfolds in healthcare. More importantly, our draft now ends with an additional drawing upon Carlson’s notion of journalistic authority. We conclude by using conceptual approach as a means to better understand the interplay between perceptions of engagement and expertise when it comes to trust and credibility for both journalism and healthcare.

We are truly grateful for these reviews, which we believe have resulted in a much stronger draft. We appreciate the reviewers’ constructive and detailed comments, and hope they find the revision acceptable.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I appreciate the authors' careful considerations of my comments. I think the revised paper is very strong. The revised introduction and literature review astutely lays out the constructionist view of expertise and how it relates to their methodological approach. The new emphasis on perceptions is well-executed throughout the manuscript including methods and discussion. I also appreciate the thoughtful ideas they put forward in the discussion section about how journalism practitioners and researchers should re-focus their work in light of the findings of this research.