A new way of looking at trust in media: Do Americans share journalism’s core values?

The study finds that not all Americans universally embrace many of the core values that guide journalistic inquiry. And uneasiness with these core values of journalism is more connected to people’s underlying moral instincts than to politics. Using the Moral Foundations Theory framework, the study goes beyond political and ideological understandings of news attitudes and behaviors. At its core, Moral Foundations Theory proposes that different people instinctively respond more strongly to certain moral values than others—such values as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. This study highlights how these innate moral values are closely related to Americans’ trust in news and how they perceive the media.