A playbook for increasing trust in news

At a time when trust in the media among Americans is at an all-time low, what can journalists and news organizations do to restore that trust? Our guests are working on innovative solutions with newsrooms and content creators across the country. 

Joy Mayer is the executive director of Trusting News and Mollie Muchna is the organization's project manager. They, along with colleague Lynn Walsh, received the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2026 Brown Democracy Medal. They wrote the book The Transparency Imperative: Journalism, Trust, and the Future of an Informed Democracy as part of receiving the award. 

We discuss the experiments in rebuilding trust that Trusting News is conducting alongside news organizations and academic researchers, including letting members of the public sit in on newsroom editorial meetings and creating a code of ethics for independent news content creators. We also talk about how nostalgia for the days of Walter Cronkite can interfere with this work — and why we're never going back to that era, as much as some of us might like to!

Watch Joy and Mollie's Brown Democracy Medal lecture.

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