The time Carl I. Hovland spent evaluating the effects of U.S. propaganda films on recruits in the Army during World War II inspired his work on information and communication trustworthiness and helped propel the field. Since that time, people have designed all sorts of methods and models for measuring trustworthiness of media and information. From Cold War inspired analysis of “the sleeper effect” to current models scoring news media, this is the first part of a two-part episode exploring measurement of media and information trustworthiness.

Find the full Trust Control documentary series in most podcast apps or listen to this episode here:

In this episode: 


• Early US military industrial complex funding of trust measurement amid the Red Scare and Cold War
• Models and methods for scoring and even color-coding trustworthiness of information and news
• The links between “measuring” the value of music and art and measuring media
• Why some trustworthiness measurement methods won’t cure news journalism’s low trust problem



People Featured in this Episode:

• Kate Kaye, Trust Control creator and narrator
• Tosan Atele-Williams, Academic Associate in the Faculty of Business and IT and Computational Trust Researcher at Ontario Tech University
• Lynn Walsh, Journalist, Assistant Director of Trusting News, Chairwoman of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee
• Matt Skibinski, Newsguard Chief Operating Officer

Key References (Mostly) in Order of Appearance

PART ONE

Why We Fight: The Battle of Britain
US National Archives
1943

Experiments on Mass Communication
by Carl I. Hovland, et al.
Princeton University Press
1949

The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness
by Carl I. Hovland and Walter Weiss
The Public Opinion Quarterly
Winter, 1951-1952

The Measurement of Trust in Communication Research Part 1
by Paola Pascual-Ferrá
Communication Research Trends

Wikipedia models of trust workshop paper Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study
by Deborah L. McGuinness, et al
Models of Trust for the Web (MTW’06)
2006

PART TWO

Information Trust Model
by Tosan Atele-Williams and Stephen Marsh
Cognitive Systems Research
2023

Towards a Computational Model of Information Trust
by Tosan Atele-Williams and Stephen Marsh
Trust Management XII
International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Advances in Information and Communication Technology
2018
(see p. 124)

infoDNA (Version 2) – Agent Enhanced Trustworthy Distributed Information
by Stephen Marsh
2004

Aesthetic Measure
by George D. Birkhoff
1933

NewsGuard Website Rating Process and Criteria

Trust Control Credits
Trust Control was researched, written, edited and produced by Kate Kaye. All interviews with sources featured in Trust Control were conducted by Kate unless otherwise noted.

Fake ads and silly satire were voiced by Kate Kaye and/or Kyle Huth.

Music
The tunes featured throughout Trust Control were written by D. Rives Curtright and performed by the band Epic Strange from Trust Control’s home of Portland, Oregon:

• D. Rives Curtright: guitar, baritone sax, percussion and drum machine
• Charlie Gotgart: bass
• Steven Francisco: midi keys
• Octavio Dowling: keys
• Dave Coniglio: drums and vibraphone
• Mike McGovern: bass on Decimation

Hear the full Epic Strange album, Nouveau Electric Mess on Soundcloud. Hear music from D. Rives Curtright on Spotify.

The work that went into Trust Control was done in Kate Kaye’s personal time and was supported by Oregon State University’s Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts fellowship on Trust in the Age of Generative AI and Oregon Humanities.