Scholars and pundits frequently argue that contemporary professional journalism is experiencing an unprecedented legitimacy crisis. Although the public’s dissatisfaction with news media is not a new phenomenon, its extent, manifestations, and potential democratic implications are becoming increasingly worrisome. Extant communication scholarship typically interprets this crisis in terms of rapidly increasing media distrust. However, several conceptual and measurement issues surrounding the construct of media (dis)trust have impeded the development of a coherent theory explaining the relevance, causes, and solutions for growing public animosity toward media. Chief among these issues is the absence of a clear understanding of the nature of media distrust, which at times has been described as a reflection of the public’s probing skepticism, and at other times has been equated to a form of debilitating cynicism.
The main argument in this dissertation is that media distrust and cynicism are two related but distinct perceptions of news media that indicate qualitatively different ways in which audiences relate to news media. Diverse theoretical and empirical evidence is presented to substantiate this argument. Combining insights from multidisciplinary research on cynicism and the study of media perceptions, this dissertation proposes a new conceptual definition of media cynicism. Here, media cynicism is defined as a generalized antagonism toward news media characterized by the belief that media actors are motivated exclusively by self-interests and pessimistic views that journalism could not be improved. Based on this definition, a new set of indicators was developed to measure media cynicism. This made it possible to compare and contrast this newly proposed measure of cynicism with the widely used instrument that measures media distrust in terms of dimensionality and relationships with external variables.
Following a complementary mixed-methods design, both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered for analysis. Data were collected in Serbia, a transitioning democracy with recent experience with oppressive regimes. The country’s turbulent history has left a strong mark on how the media operate and how the media are perceived by audiences, making Serbia an appropriate context to study negative media perceptions. Study 1 employed a web-based survey (N = 502) to test hypotheses relating to dimensionality, antecedents, and consequences of media distrust and cynicism. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses results consistently showed that the indicators of media distrust and cynicism are not influenced by the same underlying dimension. Further, structural equation modeling results indicated that the two perceptions could have different origins and consequences. Media (dis)trust appears to be predominately a function of perceived media professionalism, whereas media cynicism was found to be influenced by audience-related, media-related, relational, and contextual factors. The two perceptions may also indicate different ways in which citizens interact with politics and the news. Media distrust was associated with lower political trust and reduced news exposure through mainstream outlets and on social media. Cynicism, in contrast, was found to increase news engagement and exposure to the news through social media.
To complement the findings of Study 1 and elaborate on identified patterns, Study 2 adopted an audience-centric approach to explore perceptions of and experiences with news media in a more holistic manner. This was accomplished by conducting in-depth interviews (N = 20) with diverse participants. Thematic coding of the data revealed that experiences of media distrust and cynicism may differ based on the audience’s political interest, motivation, and self-efficacy. Whereas general media cynicism consistently applies to all media actors indiscriminately, partisan media cynicism only affects uncongenial outlets, and ambivalent media cynicism coexists with a relatively high degree of empathy for newspersons. Participants typically assessed the trustworthiness of specific news outlets or groups of homogenous outlets, and many struggled to apply these assessments to more abstract targets (i.e., news media in general). Although participants commonly used normative terms when evaluating the media (e.g., objectivity, accuracy, and neutrality), many infused such terms with their own biases, indicating a gap between academic and lay understandings of professionalism and trustworthiness of the media. In some cases, participants strongly relied on their self-efficacy instead of media trust, indicating that some audiences perceive much more control over public information than is recognized in the literature. Finally, practices relating to audiences’ media repertoires, news avoidance, and news engagement were found to vary based on the expressions of media distrust and cynicism. Importantly, the findings indicated that under certain conditions, media cynicism could lead to disruptive civic behaviors.
The findings of this dissertation have important theoretical and practical implications. In order to more precisely describe the characteristics of the crisis in audience-media relationships and understand its causes and consequences, future studies should include media cynicism when analyzing media perceptions. Moreover, this dissertation provides analytical tools that can help media practitioners and civic educators to formulate promising solutions to counter the public’s growing discontent with the media and forge democracy-supporting audience-media relationships.