Can you trust the media?

I had to leave after just 20 minutes of this event, launching Adrian Monck's event, as I had a ticket to see Laurie Anderson at the Barbican, so I missed the contributions from Andrew Gilligan and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and the audience questions.

Evan Davies (BBC, chair)

You can ask about trusting politicians, estate agents etc, but you wouldn't ask if you can trust the speaking clock...

Adrian Monck, Professor at City University

Premise of the book is that he got fed up with hearing about a crisis of trust (Paxman, Thompson)

This stops us asking the important questions.

Newspapers versus the newcomer in the '50s: television.

Had to convince advertisers that they had a special relationship with readers, and they chose trust as. Walter Cronkite turned out to be the most trusted man in America, even after he'd stopped reading the news for CBS.

The standards of truth and accuracy we expect from medical studies...[?]

Trust adopted by the BBC as a metric to replace authority.

Trust is very closely correlated with use. Google News is highly trusted in the US, but produces no news; it's just an algorithm.

Ofcom now poll on trust, even though some of them recognise that the polls are useless.

Want to get people away from talking about trust, because underneath this are lots of important issues about access to data and sources.

The claim that's got the most attention is that no one ever lost any readers or viewers by losing trust.

Trust is a balloon that we ought to burst and talk about some more important things.

Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis

Agree with Adrian to a great extent. We're all in favour of trust, but not sure what it means.

How can you check the veracity of Andrew Gilligan's pieces about Ken Livingstone? You can't.

TV presenters get high trust ratings because they look human and they talk to us.

We might recognise that our newspaper is highly biased, but we might trust it because it speaks to our circumstances and perspective.

I don't think mainstream media ever had a great reputation for truth.

Network journalism: journalists are going to have to get used to involving citizens in the process of producing news.