A Waning Trust: Is the American Media to blame for its Unpopularity?

This Monday marked the arrival of Lawrenceville’s seventh Capstone Speaker, NPR White House Correspondent Asma Khalid. While Lawrentians’ immediate focus was Khalid’s presentation, followers of the broader media industry would probably have turned their minds to the identity crisis currently engulfing NPR, which has both undermined its journalistic credibility and damaged its reputation. The chaos for NPR began on April 9, when Uri Berliner, a long-time business editor, published a lengthy piece on the platform The Free Press, entitled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” The article chronicled Berliner’s belief that NPR has allowed left-wing bias to impact its coverage: “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America,” Berliner wrote, noting that his colleagues, which had originally been a relatively equal mix of Republicans and Democrats, had over time changed into a newsroom overwhelmingly staffed by registered Democrats. The publication of the piece was met with immediate uproar from American conservatives, with former U.S. President Donald Trump even taking to his social media platform, Truth Social, to call for a halt of public funding for NPR. Since then, the chaos has escalated, as Berliner was suspended from NPR without pay, and officially resigned on April 17. However, the exit of Berliner failed to de-escalate tensions as House Republicans have invited NPR’s chief executive, Katherine Maher, to discuss Berliner’s accusations of political bias. However, criticism directed at NPR has not just been limited to those on the right side of the political spectrum: even former readers and listeners of NPR have lost faith in the once well-respected media outlet, resulting in a dip in NPR’s readership and listenership.

Yet above all, the turmoil unfolding at NPR has just become the latest example of the overall loss of trust that Americans currently hold in their media sources, as journalists continue to be seen as bearers of partisan misinformation catering to their customer bases rather than the truth;  ironically, the backlash that the media continues to suffer is a result of their own doing. More specifically, as a result of the harmful impacts of the 24-hour news cycle –which results in the publication of stories that often are not truly topical or significant– and the growing amounts of political bias that lies in the work of many news organizations, Americans continue to lose faith in the press. 

Indeed, the 21st century has witnessed a rather unprecedented spike in the unpopularity of the media, with American trust in the media hitting an all-time low in 2023, with a poll conducted by Gallup finding that just 32% of Americans claim to trust the media by a fair amount, and 39% of Americans claiming to hold no trust in the work of journalists. By comparison, back when Gallup began to poll media popularity in 1997, around 70% of Americans claimed to trust the media, with just 4-8% answering that they held no trust at all. 

Americans strongly trusted the media in the 20th century, holding journalists in high regard for their work in exposing scandals such as political and economic corruption. For example, The Washington Post was revered at the turn of the 21st century for its work in uncovering the Watergate scandal, thanks to the efforts of Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The pair’s book on the investigation, All The President’s Men, is even dramatized in a homonymous film where Woodward and Bernstein are portrayed as heroic defenders of public interest. However, the Post is now increasingly dismissed as a Jeff Bezos-owned outlet by Americans from all across the political spectrum. How did we get here?  How did journalists, and their respective media organizations, transform from resembling valiant defenders of democracy to becoming unreliable spreaders of misinformation in the eyes of the American people?

Interestingly enough, the creation of one singular media outlet, CNN,marks the first step in this bizarre transformation. 

On June 1, 1980, CNN was founded by American entrepreneur Ted Turner, whose ambitious goal of establishing a 24-hour news cycle baffled and fascinated his viewers. By definition, the 24-hour news cycle demands a constant churn of fresh, new information. For newspapers such as The New York Times, this means publishing new stories and updates on already-published pieces on their website every couple of minutes. Unfortunately, this round-the-clock structure –soon adopted by print and broadcast journalists alike, with the advent of the internet –demands the impossible. There simply isn’t enough material truly worthy of journalism to fill up a whole day, and as a result, journalists have lowered their standards for a piece to be “worthy of publication.”  In the case of Woodward and Bernstein, the great deal of time they spent investigating Watergate was what ensured that an in-depth and accurate story was shared. On the contrary, today’s journalists do not enjoy the luxury of enough time to complete quality work consistently.

While the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle may have been the first nail in the coffin for the popularity of the American media industry, it certainly was not the last: soon, broadcast outlets like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC  pounded more nails in. 

At the end of the 20th century, the public was able to receive news from their television screens for the first time. The effects of this paper-to-TV shift extend both to how we receive information and how news outlets provide it:  News anchors—the slicked-hair, white-smile personalities beaming out of our screens—are now sources of information, to be trusted and believed. However, some news anchors (such as Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow) are notorious for their political bias. 

By allowing anchors such as Maddow and (formerly) Carlson to become the faces of their respective media outlets, the media as a whole has gained tremendous criticism for its tendency to present the public with anchors that hold clear political bias. It has, perhaps most troubling, also created echo chambers where different segments of the population gain their knowledge of the world in significantly different ways, and serve in the process to further harden political divisions.

An event that marked a key development in the creation of such echo chambers was none other than the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Following Joe Biden’s victory over the incumbent Trump, Fox became a platform for Trump to present his conspiracy theories on a “stolen election,” as the former President was given extensive airtime by Fox anchors such as Maria Bartiromo to make such defamatory statements. Ironically, Fox’s decision to provide Trump with a platform to spread his personal conspiracies not only resulted in the media outlet losing its credibility but also held dire legal consequences: In 2021, electronic voting company Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox since the company claimed that its business had been harmed by Fox spreading false claims about the election. In the end, Fox opted to settle the defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million in April 2023.

From the current chaos unfolding at NPR to the landmark Fox defamation lawsuit, it’s apparent that the U.S. media is at a crossroads, as its credibility in the eyes of the American people continues to plummet; despite the seemingly bleak situation that American media outlets currently find themselves in, it is possible to make positive change and to reassert the press’ once positive standing in society. Indeed, it is only through beginning to move away from the ridiculousness that is the 24-hour news cycle and the removal of flagrantly biased news anchors that the media can have any hopes of returning to the high pedestal that it once enjoyed in American society.