The study’s report uses data from 41 focus groups in Brazil, India, Britain and the United States.
The report looks at "how differences along lines of race, caste, religion, class, and place may point towards distinct needs and expectations around news and how this intersects with people’s sense of trust in important ways,” the institute says.
In Brazil, the study focused on black and mixed-race audiences; in India, on audiences from marginalized castes or tribes and Muslim audiences; in Britain on working-class audiences, and in the United States on African American and rural audiences.
Although there were differences in the way study participants saw the world and criticized news media for their coverage of people like them, there were many commonalities in frustrations about news across these groups, the institute says. Most saw news media as not only out of touch but at times as an especially harmful force that did damage to their communities, either through neglecting them entirely or exploiting them, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, or sensationalizing in divisive and polarizing ways.
News media as an institution, especially in Britain, the United States and India, often were seen as an extension of systems aligned to serve those in power — systems many felt excluded from, the institute says.
It is "worth underscoring how similar issues have been raised by study after study after study for a very long time,” the institute says. In 1968, the report notes, the Kerner Commission critiqued similar distortions and inaccuracies in U.S news media.
An article on the report by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab says the report’s authors are clear that "though trust is thorny and multifaceted, there are opportunities for newsrooms to improve their standing in underserved communities. Those opportunities include relentlessly rooting out bias and inaccuracies, telling a 'more complete story' through news coverage that’s more positive and relevant, diversifying newsroom staffs, and being more engaged and present where people live and work.”