Determinants of Journalists’ Trust in Public Institutions: A Macro and Micro Analysis Across 67 Countries
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars have repeatedly expressed concern about the societal consequences of negative media coverage toward public institutions and political actors. Yet, there remains a lack of systemic understanding about the determinants of this cynical attitude. To examine this issue, we combine aggregate data on political and economic performance with Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) survey data on journalists’ institutional trust, watchdog and loyalty roles, editorial autonomy, professional experience, and news media ownership. Derived from interviews with 27, 657 journalists from 67 countries included in the second wave of the WJS (2012–2016), results show that democracy and press freedom are negatively correlated with journalists’ institutional trust. Quite notably, autonomous and watchdog journalists are less trusting than loyal journalists. The findings also suggest that corruption levels, annual economic growth, and type of media ownership are essential determinants in this regard.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it