The Most Expensive Two Words in Journalism

Ninety-six percent of journalists believe the public's trust in them has collapsed.

The public disagrees. Only about half of news consumers say their own trust in journalism has declined.

That gap — between how broken journalists believe the relationship is and how broken it actually is — sits inside a new study from the Reynolds Journalism Institute and SmithGeiger Group. It set out to measure something that seemed small: what happens when audiences see "no comment" in a news story. What it found is a profession so convinced of its own collapse that the conviction has become part of the problem.

I asked Randy Picht, RJI's executive director, whether the industry's despair is self-fulfilling. He said, "I think 100%. I think a lot of newsrooms have just been beaten down, and it's a challenge to keep things moving in a positive direction."

He didn't hedge. When journalists believe the public has written them off, they get defensive, do less outreach, explain themselves less, and produce exactly the distrust they were bracing for.

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Nine in ten current reporters have been stonewalled by a source in the past three years. Refusal is now the norm, not the exception.

When audiences see "no comment" in a story, 39% assume the source is hiding something. That part journalists might expect — it's the accountability reading the phrase is supposed to produce.

But 20% trust the story less, not the source. The story. The phrase journalists use to signal diligence is read by one in five readers as evidence of laziness. Only 44% of the public believes a reporter who writes "no comment" made a genuine effort to reach the source.

I asked Randy if that surprised him.

He responded, "I wish I could say it did surprise me."

It didn't, he said, because the profession has spent a decade failing to explain how its own work gets done. "We have done a lousy job of explaining how journalism works." For most of journalism's history, that didn't matter — audiences accepted the work at face value.

That world is gone, and the conventions built for it are still running on deadline.

Here's what kills me: the people who trust journalism least are the ones asking hardest to see the work. Among news consumers with low trust in journalism, 77% said journalists should be more transparent about their efforts to reach sources. Among high-trust consumers: 68%.

Every trust initiative I've watched newsrooms attempt — town halls, listening sessions, stories, and stories articulating standards — reaches only the already converted. This is the first data I've seen pointing to a mechanism that reaches the lost: not telling people you tried, but showing them in a form they can check. 

Asked to rank trust-building tools, audiences put a verifiable outreach log — when the reporter called, how, who — above everything else. One respondent's explanation was the whole study in seven words: "I can see on my own that they did it."

And it crosses the divides that usually swallow these conversations. Among Progressive Democrats, 71% say a source's refusal to answer is rarely or never acceptable. Among Conservative Republicans, 23% do — a 48-point gap. 

Half the audience has already decided an official's silence is fair play, and the only thing that moves them isn't telling that half you tried. It's showing them a record they can check, which turns the question from "what party is refusing?" into "did the reporter do the work?"

The profession founded on "trust us, we verified it" now has to show the receipts. Randy was candid about how unprepared newsrooms are:

"Verification is a big deal. We're not really built for it. It's the same thing: do we have to do that? Yes."

Now, the part of this conversation I haven't seen anywhere else.

While the survey was in the field, an editor at a newsroom near RJI's home base in Columbia, Missouri, floated an idea they plan to test this fall: when an official refuses to comment — say, the mayor — the story runs with a box listing the questions the reporter would have asked if the mayor had returned the call.

Randy walked me through the logic:

"It tells the reader (and viewer)that we were trying to get them information they would find helpful, but the source wouldn't. And if the mayor is like, well, this is how I'm going to deal with you guys — I'm not going to talk to you — it points out to the readers that this is who you elected. Somebody who doesn't want to tell you some of this information."

He's already anticipating the pushback — you're trying to make me look bad — and the study answers it. When people see "no comment," 39% assume the person is hiding something. So why, Randy asks, would a mayor want her constituents wondering what she's hiding?

What I like about the question box is its size. It's not a trust initiative. It's not a culture transformation. It's a box. Randy was clear that anything requiring real production time dies in a working newsroom — the bar is "efficient and effective, pretty flexible," not fifteen extra minutes per story. After years as a news director and, most recently, months embedded in a newsroom leading transformation, I can tell you that's right. 

Newsrooms don't need another framework. They need something they can do on Tuesday.

The most interesting topic Randy floated wasn't in the study at all.

"Ten years ago, you would be hard pressed to find a story that included the phrase, in between commas, 'without evidence.' We now see it commonly. Journalism basically had to figure out how to address what was going on, and that became standard good practice. We may need things like that around misleading comments, no comment."

"Without evidence" is a convention journalism invented, quietly and collectively, to handle claims that demanded coverage but didn't deserve credence. Nobody held a summit; the phrase spread because it solved a problem every newsroom had. The non-answer needs the same treatment — and not just "no comment" but the worthless statement, too.

The study already tested one candidate. In a video experiment, audiences saw the same story two ways: one with the standard "no comment" language, one saying "the story will be updated when we hear back." The second version won on every credibility measure, every time, regardless of viewing order — and 53% believed the reporter would follow through. A forward-looking promise instead of a dead end.

If you run a newsroom, stop telling audiences you're trustworthy and start showing them the work. The study hands you the priority order — commit to the follow-up ("this story will be updated"), make your outreach visible, and steal the question box. None of it requires a budget line. It requires deciding that showing your process is part of the job, not extra credit.

If you're an executive whose name shows up in someone else's coverage, the data is about journalism, but it's pointing at you. When your organization says "no comment," 39% of people fill in the blank with their imagination, which is always worse than your answer. Stonewalling now writes the story for you. 

And the quiet good news: the public hasn't left. Journalists think the relationship is dead, but half the audience says it isn't. The skeptics are asking to be shown the work. That's not a collapse. That's an invitation.

So: if you run a newsroom, what would you put in the question box this week? 

If you sit in the C-suite, what does your next "no comment" actually cost you? 

And if you're a working journalist, which convention on your desk is overdue for the "without evidence" treatment?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Read my column at TV NewsCheck: What TV News Preserves.

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