Break (Re)Build Trust News

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

How can we, the public, know what information to trust? This course explores this question in the context of digital news environments, which have democratized the market of ideas but also created breeding grounds for misinformation, propaganda and partisan viewpoints.This course will offer a solid theoretical understanding of how people develop and maintain trust and identify authentic information. Special focus will be given on how news outlets across the world have varied in their conceptualization and implementation of greater transparency with the aim of building greater trust. This will include an extensive examination of fact checking practices around the world and their effects in fighting misinformation and fake news.Students will apply newly gained theoretical concepts to explore and test pragmatic avenues to increase trust in the news and beyond. Through this theoretically guided, hands-on approach, students will gain a deeper understanding of recent socio-political, economic, and technological developments that have impacted communication in the public sphere -- and the publics’ increasingly fraught perception of news media and the contents they distribute.This course is for students who wish to learn how to build and regain trust -- not just with news consumers, but also with voters, customers, clients, and more. After all, trust is deemed a social lubricant essential for the success of any social, cultural, commercial, and political interaction. As such, at the end of the course, students will have gained a broad understanding about various factors that influence how trust is developed, destroyed, and rebuilt.