Navigating The News: Why Credibility Is Key In The Age Of Audience Skepticism

Be it from traditional media sources, social-media sources, or word-of-mouth sources, news finds a way. 

And as new research from Ipsos, Muck Rack, and VaynerX shows, audiences aren’t afraid to be skeptical.

“Today’s audiences are buried in click bait and sensationalized headlines, but when something feels off, they don’t hesitate to fact-check,” says the report which found a majority of consumers are taking in news multiple times a day and only a third trust it most or all of the time. “When confronted with a news story that feels questionable, 44% of consumers say their first instinct is to fact-check on their own.”

(Source: Ipsos)

The report, entitled Inside Modern PR: Trust, Timing & Building Credibility, found that a lack of evidence, data, or sources was the biggest red flag (to 65%), and for social-media skeptics, “fact-checking has never been easier.”

From the report’s PR perspective, that coexistence of legacy-media trust and social-media thirst “demands,” as Ipsos says, “that effective modern PR … fuse the credibility signals of traditional media with the scale and immediacy of social.”

As Muck Rack CEO Greg Galant tells MediaPost, the findings show that credibility is “earned moment by moment.”

“The ones who will succeed are those who show up authentically across platforms, back their stories with evidence, and build reputations that stand up to public scrutiny.”