Public Trust in MSM Falls

By Olivier Knox with research by Caroline Anders A pair of surveys about the mainstream news media over the past week or so delivered bracing news about Americans’ trust (or mistrust) in reporters, as well as a curious gap between the public and the press on the question of whether all sides of an issue deserve “equal coverage.” Both are worth exploring because they raise a lot of questions about the health of America’s news and its republic, as well as the difficult relationship between the people who consume information, notably about politics, and the troubled industry that has traditionally delivered it. Let’s start with the “trust” question.

Trust in mainstream news — television and newspapers, specifically — has fallen again, Gallup told us this week. At this point, there are probably exotic diseases that poll higher than we do, though we can take (extremely) modest comfort that Congress is even less highly regarded.

Just 16 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers. Things are worse for TV news, at 11 percent. Congress? Eek, 7 percent, according to Gallup polling that found faith in key American institutions has been eroding for years. Things get a little less bleak if you add “some” confidence — 37 percent say they feel that way toward newspapers, 35 percent about TV. But they get considerably grimmer if you take past Gallup polls showing record-low numbers of Americans trust mainstream media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly while large numbers deem us to be of low ethical character. The latest Gallup’s polling doesn’t get at the “why” of this erosion, (though Everyone Online Is Sure It Proves Them Right). That makes it harder to have serious conversations about how to win back that trust, which was never all that high to begin with. That’s if it’s even possible to restore it. LOSING GROUND In my quarter-century as a reporter, traditional news media have been losing ground in two ways: Medium (the technological means by which information is obtained) and source (the identity of the person or institution from whom the information is obtained). TV news still commands vast audiences, but go ahead and ask a 20-something “where do you get your news?” And the growth of partisan media, particularly on the right, means “getting news” in 2022 might be synonymous with “get confirmation of prior beliefs.” The news media can do a lot of things wrong — we sometimes trust the wrong sources, make basic factual errors, disregard important stories and perspectives, focus too much on incremental politics, stay stubbornly out of touch with our audience’s daily lives, the list is long. Q-Anon prophecies have come and gone, unfulfilled, but millions still believe. President Donald Trump generated an unprecedented whirlwind of falsehoods during his four years in office, and his debunked claims of being cheated out of a second term now appear to be an article of faith for millions of Republicans. So “getting it wrong” seems like an incomplete explanation for our predicament. For an admittedly partial explanation, I might look to Congress. Specifically, look at incumbents’ sky-high rate of reelection. It seems people loathe Congress but are fine with their representative. It seems plausible that people trust where they get their news, but not where people they disagree with get theirs. That comes with a big caveat. Congress has no competition. Traditional news outlets do. EQUAL COVERAGE Which gets us to the equal coverage question, explored in this survey by the non-partisan Pew Research Center. More than three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) say journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage. But 55 percent of the journalists Pew surveyed said every side does not always deserve equal coverage, a position shared by just 22 percent of Americans. Younger journalists and those with less time in the industry are more likely to reject the “equal coverage” principle. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more likely to say journalists should provide equal coverage (87 percent) than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (68 percent). Americans with low levels of trust in the media are more likely to favor the “equal coverage” aspiration (84 percent) than those with higher levels of faith (66 percent). But both are still solid majorities, and that leaves a chasm between reporters and their audiences. Where Gallup didn’t give us the “why” of the erosion, Pew didn’t give us a definition for “equal coverage,” so it’s hard to tell whether it’s an exhortation to be fair or an embrace of what has come to be known as “bothsides” coverage that equates things that aren’t close to the same. That matters quite a bit. Does a performance artist running for president (Vermin Supreme) deserve the same amount of time on a nightly broadcast as the front-runners for the major party nominations? Do climate-change deniers deserve the same column space as scientists? Those are pretty easy “nos.” There are harder ones.