Maybe this really isn’t very complicated at all. Maybe, a growing number of Americans don’t trust the mainstream news media because they don’t like what they see and hear and read, and they don’t understand what journalism is supposed to do. I first encountered this phenomenon as a journalist way back at the beginning, by which I mean about 1980.
As a kid I somehow understood that the “news” I read in the newspaper and heard and saw on radio and television was intended to inform and educate me about what was happening in the world, not to promote any certain politicians or favored views of the world. And that’s not to say that news didn’t (or doesn’t) cast some politicians and views of the world favorably, if you consider the ones who were not in the news in the first place for accusations of law-breaking and dirty dealing. Watergate happened when I was in high school – both the crimes and the reporting that uncovered the crimes – and Woodward-and-Bernstein were making “investigative journalist” a career goal for more and more college students, although that’s not specifically what attracted me…I was looking for an alternative after I decided, as someone who really didn’t enjoy college, that it would take too long to go to law school. Later I realized I made a mistake turning my nose up at “college” the way I did. Later I also came to realize that all good journalism involves “investigating” and the term of art was more a promotional pitch than an accurate description of a exclusive branch of the practice.
After having worked for a year on the college newspaper as a reporter and editor (followed by life-affirming experiences as a lunch-rush sandwich maker in a fast food restaurant and then overnight cashier in a self-serve gas station), I got a part-time job in the news department at a local country music radio station. They needed someone else to cover school board meetings since their reporter was the daughter of the school board president, and someone to write and anchor short on-the-hour newscasts on weekend afternoons and evenings. That’s what had me on the air reading the first UPI bulletin about the assault on Congressman Leo Ryan and his traveling party at Port Kaituma in Guyana before the news the next day of the massacre at Jonestown. Before long I was covering city hall and a municipal election while still a student, then going full-time after graduation. Nine months later I took a job at another station in town (for more money) as a reporter and anchor, lucky to have a terrific friend and mentor there (Olin Murrell, the late musician you may have heard of) who kept my focus on a clear and fair presentation of the stories that made up the daily news.
Olin also hosted the live evening call-in talk show on that station, and late in 1980 he gave me a chance to try it out: be the ringmaster who conducted interviews and managed an open discussion of any topic, able to articulate my opinion and be devil’s advocate with callers as they expressed their opinions, so as to generate a discussion and hold the attention of an audience. A few years ago I characterized my outlook at that time as “left of center but not crazy; I had more than one caller who complimented me for being funny and so reasonable…for a liberal.”
It was those conversations with a caller named Irene that were the first direct exposure I can remember to the accusation that the news media is liberal and biased against conservatives. It seemed to be drawn from a false belief that no person who believed in the Conservative cause and ideals – think Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority – would ever express an opinion contrary to that company line. It was as if, first, they did not believe that any reporter was capable of quarantining the influence of their personal beliefs when reporting the facts of a story, and second, that any facts reported that did not gild Reagan’s lily must be wrong or have been intentionally distorted to make him look bad. And this was long before the rise of “alternative facts” or “fake news” and today’s growing mainstream distrust of mainstream reporting. Where does that come from?
In a thoughtful piece in Slate this month, Ben Mathis-Lilley lays out the case that an economic impact on legacy media from online sources that do not prioritize fair and responsible reporting has made it “increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting.”
That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.
Where that mostly leaves the participants in media (defined broadly) is trying to hustle up a career by selling a strong perspective on the world—by having a dramatic and emotionally satisfying explanation for everything that’s happening everywhere. Its marker of success is being able to headline your own podcast or subscription-driven Substack newsletter, and it runs on opinion “takes,” which cost relatively little to produce, but have to compete for space and eyeballs on Google results, X and Bluesky, and Apple News. And in many cases, the more a take reinforces readers’ existing beliefs, the better it does. It’s a truism and a Paul Simon lyric for a reason: All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest.
So, if even the media outlets which are not ideologically bent one way or another are pushed to publish quick, emotional opinions about the news – rather than to report and present “the news” itself – in order to remain profitable and stay in business, it shouldn’t be surprising that more and more Americans have come to believe, through their own experience, that there is a lot of opinion included in mainstream “news.”
What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit. (Which, to be clear, is a take I usually agree with. There’s lots of bullshit out there!) At the same time, groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. (Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime.) It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.
For a detailed explanation of how the rise of online “news” has threatened the existence of mainstream reporting, check out Phillip Longman’s “How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism” in the first quarter’s Washington Monthly. It has a thorough background of how digital players have stripped mainstream journalism of its income and contributed to the growth of opinion journalism; I found it very educational with both scary and hopeful aspects:
[With politicians of both parties] repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press.
An extension of the attitude I first heard from Irene some 45 years ago is evident in our next president, who has a long record of attacking as corrupt and/or unfair any source of information that does not praise him. That combative attitude is present in Republicans at lower levels of government, too, many of whom (I’m talking about you, Ken Paxton) have taken to refusing to even engage with the “hostile media”…and then pander to their supporters by later attacking those outlets over stories in which they didn’t get a chance to defend themselves!
I think most people want a reliable source for news that is not biased for or against certain politicians or any particular view of how the world should be. Like the folks in a rural southeastern Colorado county who volunteered to pay more to keep their weekly newspaper from shutting down, from losing their only source of what was happening where they live. If journalism can find a way to better provide that, affordably, we can still have the educated populace that is critical to our survival as a free people…as Ronald Reagan himself said it, in 1981: “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, as Jefferson cautioned, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.”
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