Is public trust in the news media in decline? So polls seem to indicate. But the decline goes back to the early 1970s, and it may be that “trust” in the media at that point was too high for the good of a journalism trying to serve democracy. And “the media” is a very recent (1970s) notion popularized by some because it sounded more abstract and distant than a familiar term like “the press.” It may even be that people answering a pollster are not trying to report accurately their level of trust but are acting politically to align themselves with their favored party's perceived critique of the media. This essay tries to reach a deeper understanding of what gives rise to faith or skepticism in various cultural authorities, including journalism.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, the main character, Amory, harangues his friend and fellow Princeton graduate Tom, a writer for a public affairs weekly:
As measured trust in most American institutions has sharply declined over the last fifty years, leading news institutions have undergone a dramatic transformation, the reverberations of which have yet to be fully acknowledged, even by journalists themselves. Dissatisfaction with journalism grew in the 1960s. What journalists upheld as “objectivity” came to be criticized as what would later be called “he said, she said” journalism, “false balance” journalism, or “bothsidesism” in sharp, even derisive, and ultimately potent critiques. As multiple scholars have documented, news since the 1960s has become deeper, more analytical or contextual, less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal. In a sense, journalists not only continued to be fact-centered but also guided by a more explicit avowal of the public service function of upholding democracy itself.
One could go further to say that journalism in the past fifty years did not continue to seek evidence to back up assertions in news stories but began to seek evidence, and to show it, for the first time. Twenty-three years ago, when journalist and media critic Carl Sessions Stepp compared ten metropolitan daily newspapers from 1962 to 1963 with the same papers from 1998 to 1999, he found the 1963 papers “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” and was himself particularly surprised to find stories “often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things.” In the “bothsidesism” style of news that dominated newspapers in 1963, quoting one party to a dispute or an electoral contest and then quoting the other was the whole of the reporter's obligation. Going behind or beyond the statements of the quoted persons, invariably elite figures, was not required. It was particularly in the work of investigative reporters in the late 1960s and the 1970s that journalists became detectives seeking documentable evidence to paint a picture of the current events they were covering. Later, as digital tools for reporters emerged, the capacity to document and to investigate became greater than ever, and a reporter did not require the extravagant resources of a New York Times newsroom to be able to write authoritative stories.
I will elaborate on the importance of this 1960s/1970s transformation in what follows, not to deny the importance of the more recent digital transformation, but to put into perspective that latter change from a top-down “media-to-the-masses” communication model to a “networked public sphere” with more horizontal lines of communication, more individual and self-appointed sources of news, genuine or fake, and more unedited news content abounding from all corners. Journalism has changed substantially at least twice in fifty years, and the technological change of the early 2000s should not eclipse the political and cultural change of the 1970s in comprehending journalism today. (Arguably, there was a third, largely independent political change: the repeal of the “fairness doctrine” by the Federal Communication Commission in 1987, the action that opened the way to right-wing talk radio, notably Rush Limbaugh's syndicated show, and later, in cable television, to Fox News.) Facebook became publicly accessible in 2006; Twitter was born the same year; YouTube in 2005. Declining trust in major institutions, as measured by surveys, was already apparent three decades earlier-not only before Facebook was launched but before Mark Zuckerberg was born.
At stake here is what it means to ask people how much they “trust” or “have confidence in” “the media.” What do we learn from opinion polls about what respondents mean? In what follows, I raise some doubts about whether current anxiety concerning the apparently growing distrust of the media today is really merited.
Did people ever trust the media? People often recall-or think they recall-that longtime cbs News television anchor Walter Cronkite was in his day “the most trusted man in America.” If you Google that phrase (as I did on October 11, 2021, and again on January 16, 2022) you immediately come up with Walter Cronkite. Why? Because a public opinion poll in 1972 asked respondents which of the leading political figures of the day they trusted most. Cronkite's name was thrown in as a kind of standard of comparison: how do any and all of the politicians compare to some well-known and well-regarded nonpolitical figure? Seventy-three percent of those polled placed Cronkite as the person on the list they most trusted, ahead of a general construct-”average senator” (67 percent)-and well ahead of the then most trusted politician, Senator Edmund Muskie (61 percent). Chances are that any other leading news person or probably many a movie star or athlete would have come out as well or better than Cronkite. A 1974 poll found Cronkite less popular than rival tv news stars John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith.3 Cronkite was “most trusted” simply because he was not a politician, and we remember him as such simply because the pollsters chose him as their standard.
Somehow, people have wanted to believe that somewhere, just before all the ruckus began over civil rights and Vietnam and women's roles and status, at some time just before yesterday, the media had been a pillar of central, neutral, moderate, unquestioning Americanism, and Walter Cronkite was as good a symbol of that era as anyone.
But that is an illusion.
by Michael Schudson, MIT Press Direct | Read more:
Image: Walter Cronkite/NY Post
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher … than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. … People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”People have “blamed it on the press” for a long time. They have felt grave doubts about the press long before social media, at times when politics was polarized and times when it was not, and even before the broad disillusionment with established institutional authority that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s, when young people were urged not to trust anybody “over thirty.” This is worth keeping in mind as I, in a skeptical mood myself, try to think through contemporary anxiety about declining trust, particularly declining trust in what we have come to call-in recent decades-”the media.”
“Then you blame it on the press?”
“Absolutely. Look at you, you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country. … What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book or policy that is assigned you to deal with.”1
As measured trust in most American institutions has sharply declined over the last fifty years, leading news institutions have undergone a dramatic transformation, the reverberations of which have yet to be fully acknowledged, even by journalists themselves. Dissatisfaction with journalism grew in the 1960s. What journalists upheld as “objectivity” came to be criticized as what would later be called “he said, she said” journalism, “false balance” journalism, or “bothsidesism” in sharp, even derisive, and ultimately potent critiques. As multiple scholars have documented, news since the 1960s has become deeper, more analytical or contextual, less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal. In a sense, journalists not only continued to be fact-centered but also guided by a more explicit avowal of the public service function of upholding democracy itself.
One could go further to say that journalism in the past fifty years did not continue to seek evidence to back up assertions in news stories but began to seek evidence, and to show it, for the first time. Twenty-three years ago, when journalist and media critic Carl Sessions Stepp compared ten metropolitan daily newspapers from 1962 to 1963 with the same papers from 1998 to 1999, he found the 1963 papers “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” and was himself particularly surprised to find stories “often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things.” In the “bothsidesism” style of news that dominated newspapers in 1963, quoting one party to a dispute or an electoral contest and then quoting the other was the whole of the reporter's obligation. Going behind or beyond the statements of the quoted persons, invariably elite figures, was not required. It was particularly in the work of investigative reporters in the late 1960s and the 1970s that journalists became detectives seeking documentable evidence to paint a picture of the current events they were covering. Later, as digital tools for reporters emerged, the capacity to document and to investigate became greater than ever, and a reporter did not require the extravagant resources of a New York Times newsroom to be able to write authoritative stories.
I will elaborate on the importance of this 1960s/1970s transformation in what follows, not to deny the importance of the more recent digital transformation, but to put into perspective that latter change from a top-down “media-to-the-masses” communication model to a “networked public sphere” with more horizontal lines of communication, more individual and self-appointed sources of news, genuine or fake, and more unedited news content abounding from all corners. Journalism has changed substantially at least twice in fifty years, and the technological change of the early 2000s should not eclipse the political and cultural change of the 1970s in comprehending journalism today. (Arguably, there was a third, largely independent political change: the repeal of the “fairness doctrine” by the Federal Communication Commission in 1987, the action that opened the way to right-wing talk radio, notably Rush Limbaugh's syndicated show, and later, in cable television, to Fox News.) Facebook became publicly accessible in 2006; Twitter was born the same year; YouTube in 2005. Declining trust in major institutions, as measured by surveys, was already apparent three decades earlier-not only before Facebook was launched but before Mark Zuckerberg was born.
At stake here is what it means to ask people how much they “trust” or “have confidence in” “the media.” What do we learn from opinion polls about what respondents mean? In what follows, I raise some doubts about whether current anxiety concerning the apparently growing distrust of the media today is really merited.
Did people ever trust the media? People often recall-or think they recall-that longtime cbs News television anchor Walter Cronkite was in his day “the most trusted man in America.” If you Google that phrase (as I did on October 11, 2021, and again on January 16, 2022) you immediately come up with Walter Cronkite. Why? Because a public opinion poll in 1972 asked respondents which of the leading political figures of the day they trusted most. Cronkite's name was thrown in as a kind of standard of comparison: how do any and all of the politicians compare to some well-known and well-regarded nonpolitical figure? Seventy-three percent of those polled placed Cronkite as the person on the list they most trusted, ahead of a general construct-”average senator” (67 percent)-and well ahead of the then most trusted politician, Senator Edmund Muskie (61 percent). Chances are that any other leading news person or probably many a movie star or athlete would have come out as well or better than Cronkite. A 1974 poll found Cronkite less popular than rival tv news stars John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith.3 Cronkite was “most trusted” simply because he was not a politician, and we remember him as such simply because the pollsters chose him as their standard.
Somehow, people have wanted to believe that somewhere, just before all the ruckus began over civil rights and Vietnam and women's roles and status, at some time just before yesterday, the media had been a pillar of central, neutral, moderate, unquestioning Americanism, and Walter Cronkite was as good a symbol of that era as anyone.
But that is an illusion.
by Michael Schudson, MIT Press Direct | Read more:
Image: Walter Cronkite/NY Post
