IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpd/articl/v1y2018i1jbpa.11.16.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Breaking bad news without breaking trust: The effects of a press release and newspaper coverage on perceived trustworthiness

Author

Listed:
  • Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen

    (Utrecht University)

  • Femke de Vries

    (University of Groningen)

  • Wilte Zijlstra

    (Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets)

Abstract

Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of “bad news” on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release involving bad news about an error committed by an independent regulatory agency in the Netherlands. Two days after the agency’s press release, we carried out a survey experiment to test the effects on public trust of the press release itself as well as related newspaper articles. Results show that the press release had no negative effect on trustworthiness, which may be because the press release “steals thunder” (i.e. breaks the bad news before the news media discovered it) and focuses on a “rebuilding strategy” (i.e. offering apologies and focusing on future improvements). In contrast, the news articles mainly focused on what went wrong, which affected the competence dimension of trust but not the other dimensions (benevolence and integrity). We conclude that strategic communication by an agency can break negative news to people without necessarily breaking trust in that agency. And although effects of negative news coverage on trustworthiness were observed, the magnitude of these effects should not be overstated.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen & Femke de Vries & Wilte Zijlstra, 2018. "Breaking bad news without breaking trust: The effects of a press release and newspaper coverage on perceived trustworthiness," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 1(1).
    • Handle: RePEc:bpd:articl:v:1:y:2018:i:1:jbpa.11.16
    DOI: 10.30636/jbpa.11.16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.journal-bpa.org/index.php/jbpa/article/download/16/9
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.30636/jbpa.11.16?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jurgen Willems & Lewis Faulk, 2019. "Does voluntary disclosure matter when organizations violate stakeholder trust?," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 2(1).
    2. Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen & Feie Herkes & Ian Leistikow & Jos Verkroost & Femke de Vries & Wilte G. Zijlstra, 2021. "Can decision transparency increase citizen trust in regulatory agencies? Evidence from a representative survey experiment," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 15(1), pages 17-31, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Public trust; News media; Regulation; Strategic communication; Survey experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • Z00 - Other Special Topics - - General - - - General
    • D90 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpd:articl:v:1:y:2018:i:1:jbpa.11.16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sebastian Jilke (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://journal-bpa.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.