Lee, S & Santana, L. (2015) “Does Digital Media Impact Public Trust in Asian and South American journalism?” Philip N. Howard Ed. Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University

Funded by The Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Tow Center for Digital Journalism A Tow/Knight Report DID DIGITAL

MEDIA IMPACT PUBLIC TRUST IN ASIAN AND SOUTH AMERICAN JOURNALISM?

SHIN HAENG LEE, PH.D. CANDIDATE

LUIS SANTANA, PH.D. CANDIDATE

Series Editor: Philip N. Howard

Michael L. Barthel, Ruth Moon, and William Mari. (2015). Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter. Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Tow/Knight Report 030520151. 21 pp. New York, New York. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Media Trust in a Digital Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The Asian Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

The Latin American Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM

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Introduction

The continued decline of trust in the news media across most Western, developed countries is concerning, given the essential role of the media in democratic functioning and the traditional media’s own concerns with its future. But this trend is not worldwide, thanks in part to the impact of social media. It turns out that across Asia and Latin America new digital plat-forms, tools and outlets have contributed to rising perceived trust in news outlets—especially print journalism.

The recent proliferation of digital media has influenced the public’s trust of the news media in various ways, especially at the micro-level. For instance, levels of media trust have a greater impact on individuals’ patterns of media use than demographic and sociopolitical differences. The more people mis-trust traditional media, for instance, the more they seek information out-side such mainstream sources.1 Conversely, when an audience is isolated from public affairs, the more that audience is cynical about political institu-tions, including the media.2

The rapid expansion of social media in the West posits one possible scenario for the erosion of media trust. Since people became highly engaged with social media, they are increasingly receiving their news through networks of family and friends. Doing so leads to more exposure to, and reliance on, social sources rather than mass-media outlets. This communication pro-cess corresponds to the declining market share of conventional journalism. At the same time, it might mean a deepening distrust in legacy media.

Did Digital Media Impact Public Trust in Asian and South American Journalism?

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On top of such trends at the individual level, media trust also needs to be viewed in relation to factors at the national level. Press freedom, eco-nomic performance, and government effectiveness and corruption are pos-sible determinants of aggregate trust in political institutions. In addition, a country’s level of technology distribution is associated with its readiness to promote new patterns of media use and their resulting effects. In particu-lar, provided that access and usage are common, Web-based media outlets increase their share of the news market. As a result, new actors—often criti-cal of media institutions—have more capability to advance alternative voices.

Of course, traditional elites have strategically co-opted technology to manipulate new media patterns and incorporate them into the status quo. Nevertheless, it is certain that there are cross-national differences in the conditions of media trust. Those differences influence the degree of skep-ticism audiences apply to media. But given the global diffusion of digital media, we seek to understand more about how national-level factors influ-ence publics’ trust in journalism as an institution.

To answer the question, we analyzed data that recorded technology diffu-sion and public norms of trust in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Doing so allowed us to assess how media trust has changed across countries dur-ing a period of rapid social media expansion.

To begin, we articulate what we mean by media trust and how it is related to technology diffusion. We then consider Asian and Latin American contexts with respect to cross-national differences in media systems. The following sections describe our method and findings. Finally, we offer some implica-tions of the results.


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Media Trust in a Digital Environment

Public trust is an essential element in sustaining a relationship between news media and their audiences. It is crucial both to the survival of journal-ism as a business and to the functioning of democracy. From a functionalist view, audiences’ media use occurs with the preexisting expectation of gains rather than losses, resulting from their prior interaction with the media.3 This pattern gives rise to a reflexive loop between trust and use. Histori-cally, people’s greater exposure to the news media is associated with their higher levels of confidence in them. People are likely to acquire civic skills and political knowledge provided by journalists. In this respect, media trust enables journalists and their organizations to engage citizens in public life, as well as to maintain audience share and a viable business.

Two modern phenomenon demand that we analyze their effect on trust in journalistic institutions: the development of digital technology and an explosion of online information outlets. It is likely that growing distrust in the media is indicative of the increased commercialization of program-ming and content. Given increasing competition in news markets around the world, therefore, media trust matters: It foreshadows whether or not conventional journalism will maintain its role in democracy.

The worldwide diffusion of social media is also a relevant factor in media trust. Its information flow—through decentralized network structures and via personalized experiences—clearly deviates from the mass-media model. For this reason, the proliferation of social media use contributes to the fragmentation of a public that once relied on the mass media. With the


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increasing capabilities of technology to collect, generate, and disseminate information, alternative news sources are reaching wider audiences than ever before.

Taken together, commercialization and social media test confidence in pro-fessional journalism.

There are, of course, cross-country differences in the erosion of media trust, as well as the influence of social media. Particularly, the fomentation of digi-tally driven cynicism about media institutions depends upon preexisting societal conditions. In some contexts, traditional elites exercise controls over digital media to discredit and marginalize alternative voices. More importantly, social inequalities evidenced by income and education influ-ence technology diffusion and usage patterns.

Therefore, to investigate media trust in relation to the diffusion of new technology, we should consider international differences in media policy and practice. Accordingly, we examined changes in trust over time across various media platforms as well as examining changes in various societal factors: including gross national income, press freedom and internet pen-etration. Doing so allows us to deepen our understanding of professional journalism’s seemingly troubled prospects in a digital environment.


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The Asian Context

East and Southeast Asia have been characterized by rapid economic and political change since the 1980s. In particular, the substantial, rapid devel-opment of the four Asian tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) featured strong state-led development. Supporters say such growth was impossible without a planned economy, a managed private sector, and a suppressed civil society.4 Learning from this success, other developing countries have also initiated and promoted similar development policies. Within this process, the information technology industry has been one of the growth engines for the countries to achieve economic benefits.5

Globalization and the interests of international business have put neoliberal and market-oriented pressure for reform on the media systems. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, international multilateral agencies required many to take steps toward liberalization, or privatization, or both. In consequence, Asian media systems have been opened to reform, allowing privately-owned international and domestic commercial companies to enter the market. In Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand commercialization took place among both newspapers and television. In South Korea and Taiwan, demo-cratic transitions established privately owned broadcasting systems.

Despite the opening of local markets, Asian media systems struggle because of the countries’ weak democracies. Within this context, journalism largely grows on the basis of governmental objectives for supporting pro-devel-opment hegemony.6 The Chinese “Great Firewall,” and policies through-out Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam exemplify Asian states’ ambivalence


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towards liberalization. These governments are the predominant forces shap-ing media policy and practice; preexisting political and economic powers imposed bureaucratic control over hierarchical media systems.

In eastern Asia, the culture is infused with Confucianism, which empha-sizes social harmony under authority. Such political cultures in the region have impeded democratization with individual freedom.7 Furthermore, government intervention in media has been backed by a social consensus among power elites and citizens, who prioritize their economic opportuni-ties over civil liberties.8 Given this, the region’s media are shaped by careful management and ongoing political-economic bargaining. Private actors are subservient to state-led development, even with respect to the information technology industry.

In Southeast Asia rapid adoption of technology has given rise to new media processes and patterns. Vietnam, a country with severe restrictions on the media, had mobile-phone penetration close to 150 percent in 2012.9 Indonesia, despite its underdeveloped infrastructure, is one of the largest markets for Facebook, thanks to the widespread use of affordable mobile phones.10 Rapid industrialization and urbanization in many Asian countries expanded Internet access via cybercafés.

Nevertheless, a strategic approach to liberalization has prevented technol-ogy diffusion from overturning established power relations. In such cases, traditional elites maintain their authority in media systems. The transna-tional commercialization of the media has not weakened the strong domi-nance of political powers. Despite the popular use of digital media and the accompanying proliferation of information sources, the mainstream media maintains credibility. Hence, we should consider cross-country differences in public opinion toward the media institutions and their relation to the dif-fusion of social media.


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The Latin American Context

Over the past three decades, Latin American countries have moved away from authoritarian governments toward more democratic societies. In sev-eral countries, the democratizing process was “accompanied by economic recession, hyperinflation, and the adoption of neoliberal policies.”11 The current economic panorama is varied across these countries. The largest economies in the region are Brazil, Mexico, and the latecomer, Chile—all of which enjoy the status of belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international coalition of 34 nations dedicated to stimulating economic progress and world trade. These three, plus Argentina, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, are at the top of economic and human development in the region. At the bottom, Guatemala, Nicara-gua, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Haiti are still struggling with extended poverty.

The adoption of neoliberal measures in the region has also impacted the mass media. It does so particularly via “an increasingly sophisticated mech-anism of control… less politicized and more oriented towards satisfying market needs within the ideological framework of liberal democracies.”12 In Latin America, little public activity is happening outside the mass media, which are generally owned by a concentrated group of private communica-tion corporations. Keeping their independence from political bodies, media conglomerates have become powerful actors in influencing public affairs.13 The largest economic media groups in the region are: Clarin (Argentina), Globo (Brazil), Televisa (Mexico), and Cisneros (Venezuela). Their public


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relations have led to the industrialization of popular culture, as well as the homogenization of mass-media outlets.14 The rest of the countries display patterns similar to oligopolistic mass-media industries.

Political forces have started a struggle with the media groups in order to frame public discourse. In Venezuela that struggle has been fierce since the inauguration of President Hugo Chávez in 1999. Argentina, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have also tried to control the concentration of the media. Those countries have a restrictive, manipulated media environment, which has caused concern about how political powers use the media to serve their own purposes.15 Depending on the specific country, journalists have endured challenges, ranging from death threats to subtle forms of censorship.16

In relation to digital connectivity, only some countries have implemented scalable official programs (a few Brazilian states, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela). Most of the others still have pilot telecenters, usually funded by development agencies and NGOs. Still, there is important connectivity through cybercafés, which are present everywhere, with more options in urban settings than in rural ones.17


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Method

In this study, we conducted a statistical analysis using cross-national data on public opinion from the Asian Barometer and the Latinobarómetro data-bases.18 From them we obtained two waves of survey items measuring public trust in newspapers and television over eight countries in East Asia and 18 countries in Latin America.19 The first wave of survey data was conducted between 2005 and 2006, and the second wave covered 2010 and 2011. To compare cross-national differences in media trust, we calculated the mean of respondents’ trust levels in each country.20 Subsequently, we assessed whether it changed over the two time periods of survey, based on a series of paired t-tests. Conveniently, the two waves of data derive from just before and just after the arrival of social media. This allowed us to make some infer-ences about the causal role of technology diffusion on trust in journalism.

Concerning different societal conditions of media trust changes, we gath-ered country-level data in accordance with the two survey waves from diverse sources: the World Bank database for information about the gross national income (GNI) per capita relating to each country’s economic wel-fare; the Freedom House for information about the press freedom index (how much media organizations are independent of legal, political, and eco-nomic restrictions in each country); the International Telecommunication Union for information about the Internet and mobile-phone penetration rates; and Facebook for an estimate of Facebook users in each country.21 We further weighed each country’s relative share of the sum of all Internet and mobile-phone penetration rates against its relative share of the sum of GNI per capita in all countries.22 Doing so enabled us to measure the degree to which a country had Internet and mobile-phone users given its expected capacity based on economic welfare.


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Table 1. Digital Journalism and Public Trust in News Media, 2005–2011.

Gross National Income

Freedom of the Press

Internet Penetration

Mobile Phone Penetration

Facebook

Trust in N

ewspapers

Trust in Television

Country

USD

in 2011

Change from

2005

Score in 2011

Change from

2005

User Percent in 2

011

Change from

2005

User Percent in 2

011

Change from

2005

User Percent in 2

011

Change from

2005 to 2

011

Change from

2005 to 2

011

Indonesia 2,930 +111% 47 +5 12 +140% 102 +264% 13 + +

Malaysia 8,800 +33% 36 +4 61 +9% 127 +48% 34 + +

Philippines 2,060 +70% 52 −13 25 +400% 89 +117% 21 + +

Singapore 42,530 +39% 32 −2 71 +20% 145 +33% 49 + +

South Korea 20,870 +10% 68 −2 84 +8% 109 +28% 7 − =

Taiwan 18,488 +12% 76 −4 70 +11% 120 +18% 36 − −

Thailand 4,320 +49% 42 −16 22 +29% 104 +73% 10 + +

Vietnam 1,160 +84% 18 = 31 +138% 127 +958% 2 + +

Argentina 8,620 +93% 51 −8 45 +154% 133 +132% 31 = +

Bolivia 1,760 +76% 57 −8 22 +328% 72 +173% 9 = =

Brazil 9,520 +140% 57 −3 41 +93% 101 +118% 5 − +

Colombia 5,460 +86% 40 +3 37 +232% 96 +89% 44 = =

Costa Rica 6,860 +47% 81 = 37 +65% 65 +155% 26 + +

Chile 10,720 +72% 70 −6 45 +44% 116 +79% 23 + +

Ecuador 4,340 +50% 53 −6 29 +384% 102 +120% 15 = +

El Salvador 3,350 +19% 57 −2 16 +279% 124 +212% 14 + =

Guatemala 2,750 +33% 40 −2 11 +84% 126 +254% 10 + +

Honduras 1,840 +31% 41 −8 11 +71% 125 +571% 7 − +

Mexico 8,590 +14% 40 −18 31 +80% 81 +82% 8 − +

Nicaragua 1,430 +23% 53 −5 10 +290% 68 +232% 16 + =

Panama 7,810 +75% 56 = 40 +249% 189 +250% 5 = +

Paraguay 2,820 +133% 41 −3 20 +150% 92 +187% 20 = +

Peru 4,600 +70% 56 −4 35 +103% 102 +403% 6 = +

Uruguay 10,110 +114% 75 +4 46 +131% 132 +279% 13 + +

Venezuela 11,520 +134% 25 −3 37 +198% 96 +105% 31 + +

Dominican Republic

4,980 +74% 61 −1 31 +173% 90 +129% 27 = +

Note: + Significant Increase; − Significant Decrease; = Insignificant Change.Sources: The World Bank, the Freedom House, the International Telecommunication Union, Facebook, the Asian Barometer, and the Latinobarómetro.


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Findings

It is particularly challenging to figure out complex causal patterns with small sets of countries and over short periods of time. Since traditional statistical approaches fall short, new analytical techniques have been developed and one of the most powerful of these involve “fuzzy logic” models. The basic concept behind a fuzzy logic model is that the two most important elements in understanding social phenomena patterns among real cases are, and the ability to associate a causal input with a causal outcome. Sometimes this approach is called “set-theoretic” in that we hunt for consistent similarities or differences across a set of cases, and try to identify the causal recipe that consistently explains most outcomes.23

One of the things that makes comparing media systems difficult is that sometimes different causal inputs seem to result in different outcomes. Or the same cause—like increasing twitter use—might have different outcomes in different countries. More important, it rarely makes sense in interna-tional research to hunt for one, singular cause behind a trendline. Most causal explanations involve several factors, so the trick is to identify the smallest reasonable set of causes that cover the most cases in a consistent way. So the ideal causal recipe is parsimonious.

One of the advantages of fuzzy logic statistics is that they are more intuitive to understand and interpret. We could write a single report on the relation-ship between technology diffusion and trust in the media in each country—each case study has a unique narrative. But this approach lets us add up the consistent trends and identify the relationships that are not only plausible,


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but plausibly explain the most cases. Ideally, the causal recipe has two high coverage and consistency scores. Coverage refers to the percentage of coun-tries explained by that recipe. Consistency refers to the degree to which cases adhere to a particular causal recipe. Since our goal here is sensible, parsimonious explanations of real cases, our tables below present models with the best balance of case coverage and solution consistency.

Table 1 presents a descriptive summary of country-level conditions of media trust across 26 countries in Asia and Latin America. It includes the GNI per capita, press freedom, and penetration rates of the Internet, mobile phones, and Facebook observed in the second wave of survey. It also shows the extent to which such societal conditions changed between the two waves of survey. Given the t-test results, in addition, we demonstrate whether and how the mean of public trust significantly changed between the two waves of survey for each country.24

First, the countries in East Asia and Latin America have seen successful economic development: Despite their different growth rates, their aver-age GNI per capita increased about 65 percent. The improved economic welfare of the countries also came with skyrocketing expansion of digi-tal connectivity, especially via mobile phones. Across all the countries in analysis, the average number of cellphone subscriptions nearly doubled between the two waves of survey. Over the same period, Internet users increased about 150 percent on average. Also, this rapid technology diffu-sion corresponded to the countries’ substantial adoption of a global social media—Facebook. In 2011, the average number of Facebook users in the countries was 19 per 100 people, whereas we saw nearly zero percent use of the service six years before.

The Asian and Latin American contexts have various media environ-ments. Especially, the press’ independence from legal, political, and eco-nomic restrictions range widely from Vietnam (highly restricted) to Costa Rica (highly free). Differently from their prevailing growth of economic and technological conditions, however, the countries showed divergent


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paths when it comes to press freedom. In particular, the media’s autonomy improved, or at least remained intact, only in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, and Uruguay. At the same time, the remain-ing 19 countries have more restrictions on the press. It’s difficult to explain this transnational deterioration in the condition of the media without citing media controllers’ growing manipulation of, and restrictions on, the libera-tion of technologically enabled citizens.

And yet, public trust in the media still mostly increased or remained stable. In Asia and Latin America, there are 11 countries with growing trust in both newspapers and television: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Meanwhile, unlike their increased confidence in television, some countries in Latin America show unaltered trust in newspapers: Argentina, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

In contrast, Taiwan is the only country with rising public skepticism about both media institutions. South Korea also demonstrated a decreased mean of public trust in newspapers, in contrast with its stationary level of confidence in television. Some Latin American countries—Brazil, Hon-duras, and Mexico—have also gone through growing skepticism about newspapers. However, different from the Taiwan and South Korea cases, the Latin American countries demonstrate an increased level of trust in television. Last, in Bolivia and Colombia public trust in both media insti-tutions was stable.

As shown in Table 1, most countries in our analysis demonstrate increased, or at least enduring, public confidence in either newspapers or television, or both. Taiwan is the only country where public cynicism about both media institutions increased during the six-year period in question. The general pattern of results is rather opposite to our pessimistic conjectures about media trust based on its considerable erosion in Western democracies. Why did public trust in traditional media increase between June of 2005


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and November of 2010 within the Asian and Latin American countries? What are their societal characteristics that foster greater public confidence in journalism?

To look for the causal conditions of the increased media trust across the countries, we used fuzzy set logic analysis. This statistical modeling approach enabled us to identify the plausible patterns of shared causal con-ditions and outcomes. It did so by reducing the important features of doz-ens of cases to a few parsimonious recipes. The fuzzy set logic technique was useful precisely because it is grounded in the observed, real-world soci-etal conditions in Asia and Latin America. Of course, it is always possible to account for counter-cases: What are the causal conditions of growing pub-lic cynicism about media institutions, as shown in the Taiwan case? But our goal here is to investigate the overall increase of public trust in journalism across different media systems in Asia and Latin America, and not privilege such counter-examples.

The two most important measures of the accuracy of the fuzzy logic model are the coverage and consistency scores for each causal recipe. Coverage refers to the percentage of cases explained by that recipe. Consistency refers to the degree to which cases adhere to a particular causal recipe. As in many statistical procedures, the research proceeds by examining a variety of mod-els. Models that do not make sense or for which there are no real examples are dropped from subsequent analysis. A causal recipe also has a score for raw coverage, which indicates the proportion of the outcome explained by a recipe. It has a unique coverage score, which indicates the percentage of the outcome that is exclusively explained by a recipe.

Table 2 summarizes the three most parsimonious models that best explain increased public trust in newspapers among the countries in analysis. To be sure, there are more complex formulations of conditions in which we could expect trust to increase over time. And there may be other coun-try-level factors that are not included here. But from the variables in our dataset, we derived a unique and parsimonious combination of societal


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conditions at work. As noted above, there are two causal recipes for understanding the increased level of public trust in newspapers: recipes that cover large numbers of real cases and recipes that are highly consis-tent with particular cases.

Among the countries in question, trust in newspapers has increased where the media enjoy greater autonomy. That is, the enhancement of press free-dom contributes to rising public confidence in print journalism. The best examples of this causal recipe come from Colombia, Malaysia, and Uruguay.

Table 2. Under What Conditions has Public Trust in Newspapers Increased?

Causal Recipes Raw Coverage (%) Unique Coverage (%) Consistency (%)

Increase in Press Freedom 57 16 84

Lower Press Freedom, Lower Internet Use, & Higher Facebook Use

36 9 95

Higher Mobile Phone Use, Higher Increase in Mobile Phone Use, & Lower Internet Use

39 6 88

Solution coverage (%) 85

Solution consistency (%) 81

Coverage refers to the percentage of countries explained by that recipe. Consistency refers to the degree to which cases adhere to a particular causal recipe.

Also, growing public trust in newspapers occurs where Facebook is more widely adopted, even though these countries show relatively lower levels of press freedom and Internet access than average. It is certainly possible to assert that, in such restrictive media environments, public confidence in institutions is not influenced by technological capabilities. However, the diffusion of social media such as Facebook, is also capable of connecting citizens so that they may make their voices heard. For this reason, digital empowerment is often effective in promoting checks and balances in media institutions where those institutions are responsive to the challenge. The


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result is greater accountability of journalism, which facilitates elevation of trust. Nicaragua, Singapore, and Venezuela are the countries where such a causal recipe fits well.

Finally, public confidence in newspapers has been reinforced in countries with higher levels of mobile-phone adoption as well as lower Internet pen-etration. This finding reflects some trends in developing countries that leap-frog into networked society by co-opting available and affordable mobile technology at much lower costs than fixed Internet access. It is therefore plausible that the diffusion of digital technology and its associated economic growth encourage greater confidence in political institutions, including the media. Another explanation has to do with the increased accountability of elite journalists in response to technology-driven upheavals in the news market. Ironically, the participation of a diverse range of people in informa-tion flow often rebounds into credibility of media institutions. Meanwhile, elite journalists strive to maintain their authoritative position in public communications. This causal recipe is applicable to the increase in news-paper trust in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Indonesia. Together these three recipes cover 85 percent of all the cases with 81 per-cent consistency.

Table 3. Under What Conditions has Public Trust in Television Increased?

Causal Recipes Raw Coverage (%) Unique Coverage (%) Consistency (%)

Increase in Press Freedom 51 10 87

Lower Press Freedom & Lower Internet Use

48 6 95

Higher Increase in Mobile Phone Use, 52 1 84

Solution coverage (%) 87

Solution consistency (%) 78


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Table 3 outlines the best three causal recipes for growing confidence in television among the countries. Corresponding to its effect on the increase of trust in newspapers, the improvement of press freedom has heightened public trust in television. Malaysia, Uruguay, Colombia, and Indonesia are the best examples that fall into this causal recipe.

In addition, trust in television has increased in countries with lower aver-age levels of press freedom and Internet adoption. In such a restrictive media environment, people are more reliant on broadcast media as the main source for news consumption, compared with those who have digital access. This gives rise to a causal recipe for the increase of public confi-dence in television, so much so that the medium has been more widely diffused via commercialization. Meanwhile, in this case, people have few alternative channels of digitally enabled communication that might pro-mote cynicism about broadcast news. This causal condition explains the increased media trust in Singapore, Venezuela, Guatemala, Panama, Indo-nesia, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

Finally, people show enhanced trust in television when their country has a higher than average increase in rates of mobile-phone adoption. This result is contrary to our expectation. The rapid diffusion of mobile network technology has not necessarily destabilized public confidence in broadcast journalism. Rather, despite the increasing availability of alternative media, television has been able to gain greater public trust. Indeed, this is the case in many countries: Bolivia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hondu-ras, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Vietnam. Together with other minuscule causal recipes, this fuzzy set model accounts for 87 percent of the all the cases with 78 percent consistency.


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Discussion

Our statistical models suggest that the crisis of trust in journalism is neither universal nor persistent in the digital age. Indeed, public trust in traditional media, such as newspapers and television, has increased in many Asian and Latin American countries. This is particularly notable given the coun-tries’ skyrocketing adoption of digital technology, especially mobile phones. Hence, we have examined media conditions where public confidence in journalistic institutions has grown. Our findings show that in several coun-tries increased public access to digital platforms has correlated with greater public trust in traditional news outlets.

Our study confirms an intuitive assumption: The freer the press, the greater the public’s confidence (although complexities exist, which are explored below). Political and economic systems influence the workings of media companies. In non-Western countries, government intervention is particu-larly common and forceful.25 When the state wields strict control over news content, for instance, the lack of political autonomy leads to poor relations between the media and the parts of civil society that oppose the ruling party.

In many Asian and Latin American countries, citizens are emerging from restricted media environments, whether through political forces or infra-structure limitations. Previously, the media systems had supported politi-cal institutions. Lately they acted as forces of accountability. The data we analyzed, drawn from countries with variations in intellectual and material resources, produced a causal explanation that the press’ political autonomy restored public confidence in journalism.


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On the economic side, trade liberalization and commercialization also fac-tor in the relationship between the media and their audiences, and in partic-ular public cynicism about politics and the press. Neo-liberal trade policies open local markets to competition from foreign companies, who, having gained access to a market, attempt to become more efficient by reducing variation between their operations in each territory and focusing on profit. In the West, media companies’ focus on profit-making, as opposed to pub-lic service, are considered a reason for audiences’ indifference in public life, and distrust in journalism. However, this paper observes the level of trust in media institutions across various Asian and Latin American contexts. Most countries in the regions joined in liberalization and/or privatization of their media markets, accompanied by commercialization. Yet our findings demonstrate that, during the period of neoliberalism, freedom of the press did not necessarily improve but rather deteriorated. Under such social con-ditions, furthermore, there was increasing confidence in the news media.

Our analysis does not seek to understand how commercialization is con-ducive to increased media trust. Nevertheless, we do observe that in weak or emerging democracies, eras of media commercialization have coincided with development and consolidation of professional journalism. Elite jour-nalists and media conglomerates might benefit from a commercializing process that reinforces their dominant position in the market, either osten-sibly or actually.

In the same vein, access to digital connectivity has made authoritarian con-trol over media institutions more difficult. Such technology gave citizens more ability to make their voices heard. Local elites’ control ended over public communication. Therefore, traditional media organizations should have become more responsive to citizen or consumer needs and demands. Our findings support this optimistic view: When a country had higher lev-els of Facebook and mobile-phone use, the media gave greater confidence to the public.


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The expansion of social media complicates state control over mediated communication. The new media era blurs the conventional distinction between entertainment and news, as well as between interpersonal and mass communication.26 For this reason, peer-to-peer networking becomes indistinguishable from mediated public discussion from the top down. Also, diverse online platforms enable their users to form ad-hoc communi-ties around public and civic issues. Such communication patterns are dis-tinct from those in the pre-digital era, when dictators needed only to deal with a handful of mass-media organizations to manipulate public opinion.27 Autocrats’ attempts to block network access or build firewalls both con-firms digital media’s threat, and indicates a counter to it.

Authoritarian regimes’ rules have responded to the challenge of mobile phones and social media (especially Facebook) by encouraging citizens to buy and watch television, which is much more tractable than digital media.28 Their effort to keep up the power of traditional media has thus manifested as public confidence. Indeed, the findings substantiate this mechanism of growing trust in television among the countries with low levels of press freedom and Internet adoption.

However, the motivations and relationships between societal elites are com-plicated. While the introduction of politically destabilizing technology may be at odds with the interest of media controllers, the global surge in mobile phone access would not have been possible without government-led poli-cies to leapfrog into the information economy. Although autocrats can no longer wield control over the media as fully as they used to, public opinion has not necessarily resulted in political actors’ accountability. For instance, coalitions of government and media conglomerates in Vietnam and Ven-ezuela have established barriers to civil society. Simply, the greater availabil-ity of new media channels is not sufficient for improvement in the conduct of media organizations. Where, then, has growing trust in the media come from during the period of digital media diffusion?


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We should acknowledge that increased public confidence in media institu-tions occurred mostly in non-liberal political systems. Given the overarch-ing reach of authoritarian rules in such countries, public confidence derives from particular attributes of the news media (which are distinct from liberal countries).29 For instance, Americans evaluate media credibility in terms of professionalism orientation, whereas the Chinese view it based on a power struggle: the extent to which the media are independent of and challenging the government.30

Admittedly, effective government performance that meets citizens’ expec-tations leads to enhanced overall confidence in political institutions. Is the increased public trust related to that in the media? If so, media trust is the corollary of productive governing policies. This causal scenario weakens the role of digital technology as a source of better journalistic performance of media institutions.

To better understand the impact of expanding social media use on trust in the news media, our focused analysis has offered the accompanying causal recipes. In short, technology diffusion and commercialization have not nec-essarily undermined public confidence in the news media for both print and television journalism. In the Asian and Latin American contexts, increased media trust has been, rather, accompanied by the rapid diffusion of mobile phones and Facebook. It may be that in this handful of countries, changes in the ownership structure or sourcing of news content had local effects. Also, we should consider the different roles and expectations for journalism across media systems. In this light, media trust does come not just from news work, per se, but also from its specific relations to political, techno-logical, and cultural powers in a society.


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Endnotes

1 Yariv Tsfati, “Online News Exposure and Trust in the Mainstream Media: Exploring Possible Associations,”American Behavioral Scientist, 54 (1), 2010.

2 Patricia Moy and Michael Pfau, With Malice Toward All? The Media and Public Confidence in Democratic Institutions (Westport, Praeger, 2000).

3 Jay G. Blumler, “The Role of Theory in Uses and Gratifications Studies,” Communication Research, 6 (1), 1979. See also James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

4 Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

5 Nina Hachigian and Lily Wu, The Information Revolution in Asia (New York: Rand, 2003), www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1719.html.

6 Angela R. Romano and Michael Bromley, Journalism and Democracy in Asia (New York: Routledge, 2005).

7 Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy, 2 (2), 1991.8 Cherian George, Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Toward Democratic Discourse in

Malaysia and Singapore (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).9 Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2013, 2013.

10 Vindu Goel, “For Developing World, a Streamlined Facebook,” New York Times, 22 Jul. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/technology/for-developing-world-a-lightweight-facebook.html.

11 Mauro P. Porto and Daniel C Hallin, “Media and Democratization in Latin America,” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14 (3), 2009, 291.

12 Jairo Lugo-Ocando, The Media in Latin America (New York/Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2008), 2.

13 R. Trejo D. “Muchos Medios en Pocas Manos: Concentración Televisiva y Democracia en América Latina,” Intercom-Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação, 33 (1), 2010.

14 R. Trejo D., 2010.15 Porto and Halin, 2009; J. Lugo-Ocando, 2008.16 J. Lugo-Ocando, 2008.17 R. Scott, Cybercafés and National Elites: Constraints on Community Networking in Latin America,

(London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 92–106.18 The Asian Barometer and Latinobarómetro databases provide survey data covering public

opinion on political values and institutions from the eight countries in Asia and the 18 countries in Latin America, respectively. For more information about the two regional barometers, visit www.asianbarometer.org and www.latinobarometro.org.


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19 Trust in newspapers and television was measured by a question: “How much trust do you have in each institution?”

20 Respondents assessed their trust in newspapers and television, respectively, on a 4-point scale: 1 (A Great Deal of Trust); 2 (Quite a Lot of Trust); 3 (Not Very Much Trust); and 4 (No Trust at all).

21 Facebook provides daily updated user statistics from over 200 different countries via the advertisement targeting function based on its users’ Internet Protocol addresses, as well as their updated profiles. Using this function, we gathered the cross-country data on the estimated numbers of active Facebook users over 13 years of age between December 2010 and May 2011.

22 The index is derived from the ratio of the following two ratios: the ratio of Internet or mobile-phone users in a country to the sum of the users over all countries and the ratio of the country’s GNI per capita to the sum of the GNI per capita of all the countries in analysis. Also, taking the natural log of the ratio of the two ratios normalizes its distribution with a continuous, unbounded variable. For more discussion of the expression for calculating a value for the index, see Ken Anderson, et al., “Sizing Up Information Societies: Toward a Better Metric for the Cultures of ICT Adoption,” The Information Society, 25 (3), 2009.

23 Charles Ragin, Fuzzy Set Social Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).24 Descriptive statistics for all the calculated data are available upon request.25 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).26 Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy,

and the New Information Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).27 Phillip N. Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and

Political Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).28 Javier Corrales and Frank Westhoff, “Information Technology Adoption and Political Regimes,”

International Studies Quarterly, 50 (4), 2006.29 Herbert J. Altschull, Agents of Power: The Role of the News Media in Human Affairs

(London: Longman, 1984).30 Benjamin J. Bates and Tao Liu, “What’s Behind Public Trust in News Media: A Comparative Study

of America and China,” Chinese Journal of Communication, 2 (3), 2009.

Documents

Lee, S & Santana, L. (2015) “Does Digital Media Impact Public Trust in Asian and South American journalism?” Philip N. Howard Ed. Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University