My take on why Americans don't trust journalists anymore

It's more complicated than journalists failing in their mission. And reversing the numbers are key to preserving democracy.

There is nothing I love more, as a newly—minted college professor, than seeing the discussions we kick around in class surface in the real world as major news stories.

So it was particularly exciting – and depressing, I’ll admit – to see that Gallup released its most recent poll on the public’s sinking trust in news media just a few days after I broached this subject with students in my classes on journalism ethics and ther framing of race in media.

As usual, the verdict from Gallup was sobering. In a poll of 1,000 adults, they found just 28 percent expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That figure in a plunge from 31 percent last year and 40 percent five years ago.

In other words, they note “seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have ‘not very much’ confidence (36 percent) or ‘none at al’ (34 percent) in mainstream media.” This is the first time the trust level has fallen below 30 percent since Gallup started asking this question in the 1970s.

The Hollywood Reporter had a less pessimistic addition to the discussion. Citing their own polling, they noted people seem to trust individual reporters and anchors that they like - such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper or ABC’s David Muir - much more than the institutions where they work.

As usual, Republicans were much less trusting of mainstream media than Democrats, pulling down the overall scores. This also leads to an odd phenomenon where conservative champions Fox News Channel is often the most and least trusted news outlet – trusted mightily by Republicans and conservatives, but distrusted by those who don’t share those political values, particularly Democrats.

A YouGov poll from earlier this year suggests audiences may trust media outlets which seem the furthest away from opinionating on American politics, with The Weather Channel scoring top marks, followed by the BBC and PBS.

Which is a sobering sign for CBS News, where Free Press founder Bari Weiss has been installed as editor in chief after its parent company Paramount bought her site for $150 million. Weiss, whose experience is involves a lot of work as a columnist, opinion writer and editor — but not in broadcast TV news — is known for her staunchly pro-Israel views and habit of challenging liberal positions.

A statement from the head of CBS News parent company, David Ellison, says the goal is to provide “news that is balanced and fact-based.” The question is whether Weiss, Ellison and Paramount are going to try redefining balanced and fact based reporting at CBS News as journalism which aligns with their ideological priorities.

And if they do so, what will that ultimately do to the audience’s trust in CBS News?

Journalists tend to beat themselves up for scores like these, reasoning that they must be doing something seriously wrong to earn such results, year after year. But the original, high level of trust scores for journalists came during their Golden Age in the 1970s, when publication of The Pentagon Papers and coverage of Watergate forged the image of crusading journalists as a check on corrupt politicians among an audience that was mostly clueless about how the news media actually worked.

Flash forward fifty years, and you have an audience which is much more aware of some aspects of media, increasing cynicism about journalism in general. I also think we’re in a moment where the larger audience - negotiating social media platforms awash in misinformation and flailing to discern what they can trust - is increasingly embracing media messages it wants and expects to hear, rejecting truthful messages that contradict how it wants to see the world.

Other important factors bedeviling mainstream media outlets: Specific attacks lodged against the mainstream press by increasingly extremist right wing political interests – including and especially Fox News – and the changing structure of news consumption itself.

Here’s a peek at a few things that other pundits may not have mentioned which I think have a bearing on what happening:

ONLINE TECHNOLOGY FACTCHECKS US – One byproduct of a world where everyone has a universe of information sitting on their phones, is the reality that our work as journalists can be factchecked by a legion of consumers instantly. In the 1970s, it wasn’t so easy to hear about average news reports which might be wrong or offbase. But these days, every news outlet’s mistakes are a Google search away. And as hard as we all try, it is impossible for a platform big as the New York Times, CNN or the BBC to constantly pump out reporting without making mistakes the audience can discover quickly.

PEOPLE INCREASINGLY REJECT WHAT THEY DON’T WANT TO HEAR – One of the primary responsibilities of journalists is to tell people the things they DON’T want to hear – the things which are true, but are tough to face or difficult to admit. But in a media world increasingly dependent on subscription fees and beholden to the attention economy, it is tougher for news outlets to challenge the sensibilities of their audiences without losing their trust and patronage.

Twenty years ago, Stephen Colbert summed up this dynamic by coining the term “truthiness” to describe the belief in what you feel to be true, regardless of the facts. Consider reports on notable figures at Fox News Channel - the media outlet which has built an empire on catering to its audience’s worldview – who freaked out when the audience began turning on them in 2020, after they were the first to report Joe Biden would win Arizona and, likely, the presidency. That reaction – and the decision to allow their anchors to spread the lie that Trump didn’t actually lose that election – cost the channel a $787.5 million settlement, but likely helped salvage their connection with one of television’s largest audiences.

POWERFUL INSTITUTIONS ARE WORKING TO BUILD MEDIA MISTRUST – I have said for years that Fox News Channel may be the first big TV news outlet to tell its audience that their competitors in the business are actually lying to them – alleging that mainstream network TV news outfits and newspapers are biased toward liberals and won’t admit it (it’s also kind of mystified me why mainstream news outlets never responded by poking at the many ways Fox News underserves its viewers by offering a blinkered, right-centered view of the world).

I’ve also said for a long while – and it’s in my book – that it’s likely the tension between ideologically-focused news outlets like conservative oriented Fox News and liberal supporting punditry at MSNBC has hurt overall trust in news media. Donald Trump joined that chorus once he became a politician, working to inoculate his supporters against negative media coverage by crafting the battle cry “fake news.” I myself have sometimes felt I was on the receiving end of unfair coverage by Fox News as they misrepresented my columns to try portraying NPR as out of touch and hopelessly biased for liberals.

(Without taking a whole column to explain my resistance to the idea that NPR or any mainstream news outlet is overly biased toward liberals, I’ll just say that, especially these days, standing up for the value of ethnic and cultural diversity, the need for the press to watchdog big institutions like corporations and the wealthy and the importance of highlighting the need to protect vulnerable groups like transgender people and undocumented immigrants from unfair persecution can feel like liberal bias to some.)

BIG MEDIA OUTLETS SOMETIMES EARN THAT MISTRUST – Aside from regrettable mistakes, there are also times when big media outlets deliberately take actions which betray the audience’s trust. CNN’s decision to let Chris Cuomo feature friendly chats with his brother Andrew, who was governor of New York, as the state was struggling to cope with the growing COVID epidemic in 2020, was a good example (Chris Cuomo was later fired by CNN, after it concluded the anchor had advised his brother on how to handle a scandal). The Washington Post seeming to allow and even encourage an exodus of talented journalists, especially journalists of color, who aren’t friendly to President Trump or MAGA is another case. Every time a news outlet chooses to act in a way that is journalistically unethical to further its own special interests, that is bound to hurt trust among the general public.

Doesn’t help to see billionaires who own big media platforms visibly choose their own business interests over their responsibility to help secure the public’s access to accurate information – with Exhibit A being Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end fact checking on Facebook, sparking a flood of AI-fueled misinformation which has swamped the platform.

AVERAGE PEOPLE STILL SOMETIMES DON’T GET HOW JOURNALISTS WORK – I have no data for this, but I’m convinced from my own experiences that mainstream journalists still don’t do a great job explaining how they do what they do or why. Why are some sources not named in major reports and how do we know what they are telling us is accurate? Why do we decide to cover some stories and not others? What’s the difference between something told to us “off the record,” “on background” or “on the record”? In my classes this year, I played the scene from the recent Superman movie where Lois Lane interviews her boyfriend Clark Kent as Superman. Lois criticizes Clark for writing Daily Planet stories where he ”interviews” Superman – essentially interviewing himself without telling readers. But she’s also interviewing him without telling her readers she knows he’s Superman OR telling them that he’s also her boyfriend. (as an added kick to journalism ethics nerds, when her boss, Daily Planet editor Perry White, figures out his star reporter is canoodling with the subject of their front page blockbuster story he…laughs it off. Sigh.)

If the general public believes that situations like that would be tolerated at a major newspaper, no wonder there’s declining trust. (And yes, I know I’m treading on the dangerous ground of journalism AND comic book nerditry. Sigh.)

There’s lot more reasons why mainstream journalism is losing trust these days – I’m sure you’ll let me know what I didn’t cover in the comments below. But one look at this myriad of influences shows that any attempt to tell the story of journalism’s declining trust as a simple story of journalists failing in their jobs is simplistic and only likely to speed the trust decline unfairly.