Four of five members of the public believe special-interest groups can manipulate us. Half our readers find misleading heads once a week. Nearly half find what they see as errors in stories about which they have personal knowledge. These numbers may not necessarily surprise you, but they do say loudly and clearly that we have a great deal to fix. There is, of course, no silver bullet to solve our problems.
Credibility is about the quality and integrity of our news report.
It is about understanding, articulating and applying high professional standards. With our formal announcement of the national research results, we made a clear statement that we know we have problems and we care. We also are doing something about them. In fact, this is the most exciting part of the project. Eight newspapers are using the national research to develop and test real-life solutions to the credibility problems that we exposed in the research.