Despite the central role that ordinary citizens play as ‘trustors’ (i.e. the actor that places trust) in the literature on news media trust, prior quantitative studies have paid little attention to how ordinary citizens understand and define news media trust. Here, trust tends to be studied from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective. To address this gap, we investigate how the public describes news media trust in their own words by asking them directly. We analyse 1500 written responses collected through a Norwegian online probability-based survey, here using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM). We find that citizens’ own understanding of news media trust can be categorised into four distinct topics that, in some instances, are comparable to academic and professional discourse. We show that citizens’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by many of the same variables that prior research has found to be important predictors of levels of trust. Respondents’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by education and satisfaction with democracy but not other known predictors of trust, such as ideological self-placement and political preferences.

尽管普通公民在新闻媒体信任的文献中扮演着“信任者”（即放置信任的角色）的核心角色，但是先前的定量研究很少关注普通公民如何理解和定义新闻媒体信任。在这里，信任往往是从研究者定义的而非受众定义的角度进行研究的。为了解决这一差距，我们调查了公众如何通过直接询问新闻媒体信任来用他们自己的话来形容。我们使用一种称为结构主题建模（STM）的半监督定量文本分析技术，分析了通过挪威在线基于概率的调查收集的1500个书面回复。我们发现，市民对新闻媒体信任的理解可以分为四个不同的主题，在某些情况下，可与学术和专业话语相提并论。我们表明，公民对新闻媒体信任的书面描述因许多相同的变量而有所不同，先前的研究发现这些变量是信任水平的重要预测指标。受访者对新闻媒体信任的书面描述因受教育程度和对民主的满意度而有所不同，但其他已知的信任预测因素（例如意识形态上的自我定位和政治偏好）则不一样。