Credibility: Deciding Who Deserves Your Trust

Every non-fiction text asks you to trust someone. A news article asks you to trust a reporter. A documentary asks you to trust a filmmaker. A textbook asks you to trust whoever gathered its facts. Credibility is the quality that earns that trust, and a writer does not get it automatically just by publishing something. You have to look for it, the same way you would size up a stranger giving you directions. Does this person actually know the way, or are they guessing?

A writer builds credibility in a few concrete ways. Expertise is one: has this person spent real time studying or living the subject they are writing about? Institutional backing is another: does this piece appear somewhere that checks its facts, or somewhere that will publish anything? Sourcing is a third: does the writer show you where their claims come from, or do they just assert things and expect you to nod along? A credible writer shows you the work behind the claim, not just the claim itself.

Duncan McCue, a journalist with CBC and a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation, does exactly this in his essay "What It Takes for Aboriginal People to Make the News" (2013). McCue argues that Canadian news coverage repeatedly reduces Indigenous people to four narrow images: drumming, dancing, drunk, or dead. That is a strong claim, the kind a careful reader should be suspicious of by default. McCue earns trust in two specific ways. First, he writes from direct experience as a working journalist who has covered these stories himself for two decades. Second, when he takes on the stereotype of the "drunken Indian," he backs his claim with a specific study from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: the study found that abstinence from alcohol is twice as common among Indigenous people as among non-Indigenous Canadians. That one statistic earns more trust than a page of confident opinion.

Credibility also depends on framing: what a text chooses to include, leave out, or emphasize. McCue's essay is itself an act of naming a frame. He shows how newsrooms, without necessarily meaning to, keep choosing the same four story types about Indigenous people while ignoring almost everything else. Framing is not automatically dishonest. Every writer has to choose what to include and what to cut. A careful reader asks what got left out of the frame, and why, before deciding how much to trust what made it inside.

The same principle works in reverse. When you make a claim in your own writing, a reader will ask the same questions of you: what is your evidence, and have you shown it clearly enough to be trusted?

As you read McCue's essay, hold two questions in mind. What specific evidence does he offer, and where does he expect you to take his word for it? Once you notice his "4 Ds" pattern, can you think of a news story you have seen that fits it, or one that breaks it?