Meeting report: “Journalism’s Impact on Public Trust in Science”. Workshop, 2025, Berlin, DE = Meeting report: “Journalism’s Impact on Public Trust in Science”. Workshop, 2025, Berlin, DE

Khe European initiative ‘Inspiring and Anchoring Trust in Science’(IANUS) seeks to interrogate the conditions under which suchtrust becomes possible, legitimate, and generative. Attentive tosocietal apprehensions regarding scientific authority, it fore-grounds inclusive and transparent modes of scientific engage-ment. Crucially, rather than assuming trust as an a priori good,IANUS cultivates ‘justified trust’ – acquired through critical in-quiry and collaborative epistemic work. The aim is to enable thepublic to evaluate scientific developments carefully. What a rel-evant claim, especially in these times when, among other things,half-truths have been used in political election campaigns andwhen researchers worldwide have to defend themselves againstmisinterpretations of their research results.Two daysafterGermany’sBundestagswahl,an election shapedby intense media coverage and staged political narratives, theworkshop took place. A collaborative endeavor conceived byIANUS researcher Dana Mahr and journalist Katja Thorwarth,bringing together around 40 participants, including journalists,scientists, and activists. The project centered on the question:How can journalism foster trust in science? In an era wheremisinformation proliferates across digital landscapes, threaten-ing the credibility of scientific knowledge and the legitimacy ofpolitical decision-makingand journalistic integrity, this questionacquires an acute urgency. ... mehrHowever, discussions raised anotherquestion: Is ‘trust’ the proper term to describe the relationshipbetween science and journalism, or should it rather be a form ofcontrol – well-intentioned but constrained by epistemic author-ity?