Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Effects of Media Criticism on Gatekeeping Trust and Implications for Agenda Setting Raymond J. Pingree, Andrea M. Quenette, John M. Tchernev, & Ted Dickinson School of Communication, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA This study explores causes and consequences of gatekeeping trust, a new media trust construct defined as trust that the news media selects stories based on judgments of the importance of problems. If this form of trust — rooted in a misunderstanding of news story selection practices—is what drives agenda setting effects, these effects can be seen as a miscommunication between the media and the public, and perhaps a correctable one. An experiment manipulating exposure to and expression of media criticism finds gatekeeping trust can be reduced without also affecting more desirable forms of media trust. Gatekeeping trust is also the only media trust construct to positively predict an indicator of agenda cueing and negatively predict an indicator of agenda reasoning. doi:10.1111/jcom.12016 This study explores causes and consequences of gatekeeping trust, a new media trust construct defined as trust that the news media selects stories based on judgments of the relative importance of social problems. Gatekeeping trust is a particularly problematic form of media trust because it suggests ignorance of factors other than problem importance that influence news story selection. Research on news production and gatekeeping has delineated many such factors (Atwood, 1970; Atwood & Grotta, 1973; Brown, 1979; Price & Tewksbury, 1997; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009; Tuchman, 1978). In summary, news workers primarily assess newsworthiness in their daily work in terms specific to individual news events instead of any underlying social problems (Lester, 1980; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009), and are strongly influenced by an event’s news values such as timeliness, novelty, conflict, and drama (Price & Tewksbury, 1997), all of which can be independent from or even opposite to systematic judgments of problem importance. The primary motivation for our interest in gatekeeping trust is the possibility that it may have implications for agenda setting, both in terms of its cognitive mechanisms and its normative implications. Agenda setting is the effect of media coverage on Corresponding author: Raymond J. Pingree; e-mail: pingree.2@osu.edu Journal of Communication 63 (2013) 351–372  2013 International Communication Association 351