Media Trust in a Digital World by Thomas Osburg & Stephanie Heinecke

Author:Thomas Osburg & Stephanie Heinecke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030307745
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3 Transparency and Media Criticism

Transparency has meanwhile become an increasingly important quality criterion of journalism, as emphasizes i.a. Claudia Mast in her basic work “ABC of journalism”. The fact that to gain that transparency journalists criticize each other as in the aforementioned case, is in my opinion by no means to be classified as persnicketiness. No, here media criticism is conducted in a constructive manner, which in turn can steadily improve the quality and credibility of journalism. The correction of errors is still not very prominent in German journalism, Ruß-Mohl even speaks explicitly of a “missing corrective culture” and “ignored search for errors” (Ruß-Mohl 2016). The media professor also complains of significant shortcomings in media journalism: this has been “greatly reduced in the recent past, yes almost completely unwound.” So not only the audience lacks “a reliable guide in the media jungle, but also journalism and the media industry miss a seismograph – a visible continuous introspection, suffice to professional journalistic standards.” While there are some media blogs as the already mentioned Übermedien or the watchblog Bildblog, also relevant media services such as turi2, Meedia, DWDL and others have continuously and sometimes very critical written about their colleagues, but to the general public these offers apparently have not yet the big impact. However, this would not be unimportant, because these offers ultimately work at a high level to reduce the widespread distrust in the media about self-criticism.

Also on a somewhat lost post as far as the resonance of the audience is concerned, are the so-called ombudsmen. Such positions, which occur between the audience and the editorship as a “reader’s lawyer”, are currently available in about a dozen German media. “But we are still very few”, admits Anton Sahlender of the Würzburg Main-Post (Prinzing et al. 2015). Those intermediaries might very well contribute to greater credibility for journalists: “Just that too few people know how journalism works and what tasks they have, vandalize the reputation of journalism”, Sahlender claims. The basic teaching of media literacy even in elementary school would certainly have further potential to strengthen the credibility of journalism.

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