Media as an expert system and an area of trust

Mass media activity should be considered not only as informing the audience, but also as establishing trust between the editorial offices and the public. It is about rational trust in the media as an expert system that organises our information environment and partly our social environment. Anthony Giddens studied trust in expert systems, but the phenomenon of trust in the press has not been studied much, although sociologists have measured attitudes to different social institutions for decades, including trust in the media. Today, the level of trust in institutions in Russia is generally low, but trust in media (in 2017, 32 percent, according to the Edelman Institute) is at one of the lowest levels in comparison with similar indicators in other countries. The fall of trust is one of the reasons for the systemic crisis of journalism. The distrustful attitude of the audience towards the media largely explains the place, role and prospects of media in Russian society, as well as the disoriented state of the society itself. We are dealing with a double-thinking person demonstrating loyalty to power (to an authoritative media discourse) and simultaneously experiencing a strong mistrust in it. The ambivalence or co-existence of trust and mistrust show the traditions of the authoritarian system of social life, where fear is in the first place and trust in the last. Our trust is determined by history and culture. Trust is not a constant, it can be viewed as a spectrum of relations or a continuum with several levels. Complete and unconditional (blind) trust is unreasonable. The other extreme is the absolute mistrust in the texts of journalists, a kind of media agnosticism and absenteeism. Without trust, people are forced to resort to informal practices and surrogates, while trust at the institutional level makes the state workable. Institutional trust in the press is a driver of media economics. Mistrust in the public sphere complicates human interaction with organisations, makes it difficult to understand the world and ultimately hinders the development of society. A professional journalistic community should fully understand the risks associated with reducing or losing the trust of the audience. Understanding the threats, the professional community could develop a program to restore the lost trust in the media industry as a whole and in certain types of journalism related to social problems.

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