Research on trust in the media is based on the assumption that trust in traditional news sources such as newspapers, radio or television is a meaningful indicator of the vitality of liberal democracies. However, this assumption can hardly be upheld in an increasingly globalized and diversified media landscape in which alternative media are gaining more and more influence.
In the tenth Contrust Working Paper “Trust and Spectatorship”, Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger (film scholar and member of the “ConTrust” research initiative) argues that it is not enough to measure the amount of trust within individual nation states in longitudinal studies to gain a successful understanding of trust in the media. Instead, it is necessary to question how trust in the media works, how it is related to mistrust and how it interacts with conflicts. Based on Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s documentary “The Viewing Booth” (2019), Hediger focuses on the question of viewership and examines the extent to which media can influence our trust and our reasons for trusting or distrusting.
To the Working Paper in Open Access:
