Creating trust in the Media
“How can you
Make people trust you?
As a journalist you should be educated and Informed:
in tune to developments in society, conscious of how basic law and economics work, in tune to interests of the public. This way you inform your audiences to make better
Decisions that will serve their interest, and they Will trust you.”
By Titi Bamigboye
Just like every human relationship, the more truthful and open a partner is, the tendency for more trust to be built in that relationship. Sometimes however, for the good of the relationship, one partner withholds some information from the other because he feels that it is not important or might affect the relationship negatively. The Media is in a relationship with the public. In fact the Media exist for the public. It is the duty of the Journalist to look out for the people’s interest. The Journalist does this through the information he passes across and how he passes them across. In passing information across, the Journalist must understand his environment, he must be knowledgeable about what works and what doesn’t given the written and the unwritten codes that guide living in that society. He must think about how his news piece would impact his society and how beneficial such a piece is to them. The Journalist must rise beyond just passing information he thinks the people need to projecting how the information would affect their actions. Just like a lover would go to lengths to find a gift that he thinks his partner would appreciate and need, the Journalist goes to length to uncover, dig out or source information just for the consumption of the public. There is a kind of hunger or thirst for information that needs to be assuaged, the media organization that satisfies this need the most, earns the trust and attention of the people. This trust is what yields benefits for the medium because the people will have more confidence investing their resources in such a medium. The Journalist must also know that he is in competition with other mediums…Therefore, to sustain the existence and usefulness of his Medium, he must earn the trust of the public by consistently satisfying the people’s need for information.
