Among journalists, last week’s news that public trust in the media has fallen to an all-time low was accompanied by the wringing of hands, the gnashing of teeth, and the rending of garments.
According to Gallup, just 32 percent of Americans surveyed in early September believe that the media “report the news fully, fairly and accurately.” That’s down from 40 percent just last year—and from 55 percent in 1999, when newspapers were profitable, the Big Three networks newscasts were inviolable, and the cable news networks had not yet hit upon partisan shoutfests as a formula for filling hours of airtime at very little expense.
Gallup’s findings, which we talked about last Friday on Beat the Press, are serious and disturbing for a craft that relies on credibility. At the same time, though, there’s less here than meets the eye, starting with the specific question Gallup asked:
In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media—such as newspapers, T.V. and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly—a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?
There is a problem here, and it comes in the form of two words: “mass media.” Do you trust “the media”? What, after all, is “the media”? Or is it an “are”? The simple truth is that the internet has created an explosion of news and opinion outlets in recent years, rendering obsolete the very idea of a monolithic media. A rational news consumer is likely to trust the few sources that she checks in with on a regular basis and cast a skeptical eye on the rest.
It’s a little bit like the old saying that we hate Congress but like our individual member of Congress. You may despise the media, but you like the newspaper you subscribe to either in print or digitally, the television newscast you watch regularly, and the three or four or 10 blogs and opinion websites you read. As David Uberti put it at the Columbia Journalism Review, “There is no media. There is only my media and your media.”
Thus we find studies such as one by the Pew Research Center showing that liberals trust media sources such as the New York Times, NPR, and PBS, and distrust Fox News and Rush Limbaugh—with mirror-image responses from conservatives. And believe me, I realize how ridiculous it is to compare the Times and Limbaugh’s radio show as though they differed only on ideology. Blame Pew, not me.
An academic analysis of how the sheer number of media outlets has led to distrust was expressed in a 2012 report titled Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present, by the Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. As co-authors C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky wrote:
The decay of the traditional agenda-setting function of the press will continue, and with it the idea of “the public” as a large, interconnected mass of news-consuming citizens. Choice in available media outlets will continue to expand, leading not so much to echo chambers as to a world of many overlapping publics of varying sizes. Seen in this light, the long-term collapse of trust in the press is less a function of changing attitudes toward mainstream media outlets than a side effect of the continuing fragmentation of the American media landscape. [My emphasis.]
Gallup gets at this a bit, blaming the recent decline in trust on the exponential growth of online opinion as well as attacks on the media by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters. Indeed, the survey found that 51 percent of self-identified Democrats continue to trust the media as opposed to just 14 percent of Republicans. Among independents, the proportion is 30 percent.
Of course, Republicans have been attacking the media for many years, with allegations of liberal media bias emerging as a staple of conservative rhetoric ever since Spiro Agnew denounced the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Never mind that many members of the admittedly liberal national press corps love nothing better than to bash their putative allies on the left—as we’ve seen recently in the breathlessly endless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the status of her health.
Asking members of the public whether they trust “the mass media” is the wrong question because, in many ways, there no longer is a mass media. Instead, there are a multiplicity of media, each covering its niche in ways that we may or may not like. We trust the media we choose to rely on, but we hate “the media.”
The danger in this, needless to say, is that we will choose media outlets on the basis of whether they cater to our pre-existing biases and beliefs rather than for their accuracy, thoroughness, and context. There are still news organizations dedicated to the proposition of being fair, tough, and reporting the best available approximation of the truth. We have more choices than ever before. Let’s choose quality.
