Getty Fourth Estate The Public’s Correct Not to Trust the Media But that doesn’t mean the media’s not doing its job well.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer.

Will somebody please order Chris Cillizza a Pick-Me-Up bouquet to restore his spirits? Earlier this week, the rawhide-tough Washington Post political reporter was driven to the weeping room by a recent Gallup poll that says the American public’s trust in media remains mired at its historical lows. Only 40 percent of respondents place a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the media’s reporting. That’s a steady slide down from 55 percent in 1998 and 1999.

Ensconced in the weeping room in all his sorrow, Cillizza composed an item lamenting the poll’s findings, blaming media distrust on “partisans” who blast the press as biased—and on “a bumper crop of partisan-first media outlets designed to foment rage and exasperation with the mainstream media’s alleged missteps.” Such views are “plain terrible for the American public,” he exclaimed, before saluting the press for doing “its best to hold those in power accountable.”


I confess to misrepresenting Cillizza’s emotional state by a few parsecs, but his media distrust response is the stock one in most newsrooms. Journalists can’t understand why they’re not universally loved, why there is no national journalism appreciation day and why the trust numbers have been declining despite all of their hard work.

To them I say, don’t get greedy. A 40 percent approval rating is pretty good! Only 28 percent of Gallup respondents expressed a “great deal” or a “quite a lot” of confidence in banks, down from 60 percent in 1973, the first year Gallup asked the question. Confidence in organized religion is down to 42 percent from 66 percent in 1973. In fact, Gallup finds that confidence in most U.S. institutions are below their historical averages. Congress, down to 8 percent from its average of 24 percent. The U.S. Supreme Court, down to 32 percent from 44 percent. The presidency, down to 33 percent from an average of 43 percent. The only two institutions to enjoy a rise over their historical averages are the military and small business.

What explains the near complete decline in trust and confidence for institutions? I’m not the first to suggest that the press may be at fault. As scholars Katherine Fink and Michael Schudson wrote in a 2013 paper, press coverage of “Congress in the 1950s and into the 1960 was, as one contemporary called it, ‘overcooperative.’” Journalists respected the territorial boundaries erected by the political establishment, relying on “handouts and routine news briefings” for their stories, as one veteran of those years put it.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that whatever the Congress and the president wanted the public to know about Capitol Hill and the White House was eagerly conveyed to them by a pliant press. Press scholar Carl Sessions Stepp, who has read deeply in the newspapers of yore, summed up the period’s deficiencies in a September 1999 American Journalism Review essay. “To read 1963 newspapers is to re-enter a pre-Watergate, pre-Vietnam, pre-Dealey Plaza world. It is to roll back a gigantic cultural loss of idealism,” Stepp wrote. Those papers were “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging.”

The Schudson-Fink paper, which I urge you to read, cites research to document journalism’s aggressive turn over the past five or six decades. Questions posed in presidential press conferences have become more assertive. News stories have grown longer and longer. The press has shifted from documenting important events to providing context to their work (via investigative, interpretative, explanatory, analytical reporting). In the process, reporters have changed from “silent skeptics” to “vocal cynics,” as one writer put it.

What caused American journalists to wise up? Schudson and Fink entertain the idea that better-educated readers and better-educated newsrooms played a role, as did the increased use in computers and the growing complexity of modern life. Television freed the daily newspaper from the chore of describing events, and that liberated the newspaper to explain what those events meant. In recent decades, the old network news oligopoly of CBS, NBC and ABC has been demolished by new entrants, and native-to-the-Web news organizations have similarly undermined the daily newspapers. Instead of building a false consensus—which the press did too often in the post-World War II, pre-1970 era—many contemporary journalists strive to produce accounts to quarrel with what the competition is printing or broadcasting. It takes time and intelligence to sort out contradictory news reports. Those who don’t have the time or the interest to do the sorting might be inclined to throw up their hands and accuse the entire press of being untrustworthy.

It may seem counterintuitive but a strong case can be made that the public trusted the press more when it was less trustworthy. The many criticisms the press has heaped on government—and other institutions—have tarnished the public relations shine of those institutions. That the public might have become less enamored of the press as it has grown more independent and combative only stands to reason. For one thing, the pushy, know-it-all, argumentative journalistic style required to dislodge information from governments and corporations isn’t very likable. For another thing, the intelligent skepticism practiced by modern reporters, once released from the bottle, cannot be shoved back in. It only makes sense that the public, exposed to critical thinking by the press, should redirect that critical thinking back onto the press itself. The more people know, the less they trust.

I never write about the press and trust without quoting from Adrian Monck and Mike Hanley’s 2008 book, Can You Trust the Media? “Trust is a shoddy yardstick. It doesn’t gauge truth, it gauges what looks close to the truth: verisimilitude,” they write. Case in point: Older respondents (50 or older), currently trust the media 9 percentage points more than do those 18 to 49 years old. Democrats trust 23 percentage points more than Republicans. What the Gallup yardstick is measuring is not absolute trustworthiness but shifting impressions driven by age, political predisposition, and—I would guess—class and media consumption.

Chris Cillizza’s sadness notwithstanding, the latest Gallup polls don’t necessarily mark a crisis for journalism. If you consume a lot of news and you don’t trust everything you see, you’re probably doing it right.

******

If I trusted the press would I be a press critic? Send trust-tokens via email to [email protected]. My email alerts, Twitter feed, and RSS feed are all sentient. I cannot speak for their trustworthiness.