Award won:

• ICA Political Communication PhD Dissertation Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Meagan Doll, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities (formerly University of Washington)

 

Project title:

• “Beyond believability: Factors driving media trust in Uganda”

 

Publication reference:

• Doll, M. E. (2024). Beyond believability: Factors driving media trust in Uganda[Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington]. University of Washington ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3081551993?fromopenview=true&pq-origsite=gscholar&sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

• I came to my research interests after previous professional layovers in journalism and interdisciplinary African studies. Part of these experiences included living and working in Uganda as a reporter, where I realized that day-to-day interactions with and perceptions of news media were much different than the Euro-American contexts that I was familiar with. When it came time to select a dissertation topic, I knew that I wanted to help elucidate these evaluation processes as well as contribute to the internationalization of political communication research.
•  

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• Evaluations of media trust may be as much a reaction to trust in other social institutions than any substantive evaluation of media performance. In Uganda, this manifested as reportedly positive perceptions of journalists relative to broad distrust aimed at political elites.
•  

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• Media trust has been studied ad nauseum in political communication with many important contributions. However, much of this research has been conducted in middle- and high-income democracies with less work exploring media attitudes in more authoritarian environments. In addition to further internationalizing media-trust research, the project integrates audience-studies perspectives from journalism studies, which I hope illustrates the theoretical benefits of integrating work across the political communication and journalism studies sub-areas.
•  

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

• I would conduct the telephone survey in-person (as opposed to by phone) and ideally with a larger sample. The CATI survey was an acceptable tradeoff given resource constraints, but I am aware that this choice inevitably shaped the types of respondents I was able to reach and ultimately the spectrum of attitudes reflected in the project’s findings. If money and time allowed, I would have also scheduled a week or two of holiday in Uganda following my qualitative fieldwork to visit with friends, but c’est la vie!
•  

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

• I am energized by all work that (re)examines existing concepts across diverse sociopolitical environments. Public Opinion Quarterly, for example, is set to release a special issue on this topic in 2026, and there are a number of other projects that explore the influence of social and political environments on perceptions of news, specifically (e.g., the Reuter’s Institute Trust in News Project). Relatedly, I’m excited about the growing corpus of scholarship that moves beyond quantifying the crisis of trust in news to consider innovative approaches for restoring trust in journalism and social institutions more broadly.
•  

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

So many options! On one hand, I’m interested in extending aspects of this project to look at the plausibility and appetite for trust building initiatives in the Ugandan context. This is closely related to the work I’ve been engaged in at the University of Minnesota, which explores the effects of news organizations’ trust building strategies in the United States.

On the other hand, I’m also very interested in replicating – more or less – the study on factors driving media trust in a different socio-political environment to test the boundary conditions of my theorizing. Truth be told, that would require either a substantial amount of background research and area studies on my part or perhaps the help of a collaborator with experience in a given context. If that sounds up your alley, let’s connect!