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Recently, the Pew Research Center published a report attesting to a deeply polarized news landscape, in which trust falls along ideological lines. Democrats are significantly more likely to trust major news organizations—ABC, CBS, and NBC among them—which Republicans tend to view as liberal media machines. A majority of Republicans trust Fox News, which Democrats overwhelmingly see as GOP propaganda. Around the same time, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found, in its annual digital news report, that “traditional US news media increasingly risks being eclipsed by online personalities and creators.” These include the usual suspects of the right-wing podcast and YouTube sphere—such as Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, and former Fox-er Tucker Carlson—as well as characters from the left: Brian Tyler Cohen and David Pakman. “Some of the most popular personalities over-index with young men, with right-leaning audiences, and with those that have low levels of trust in mainstream media outlets,” Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute, wrote, “seeing them as biased or part of a liberal elite.”
That is a picture Donald Trump has done much to shade in. But it is not one that only his supporters see. In reality, he has taken advantage of a situation that preceded his political rise. The partisan trust problem is as old as journalism itself—in 1846, the emergence of the Associated Press introduced the ethics of objectivity as an alternative to politically affiliated coverage. That has since revealed its shortcomings and, lately, much of the news marketplace has returned to old habits. A modern history might place the beginning of this shift in the early aughts, with the popular rise of the internet and the invasion of Iraq: legacy outlets cheered for war, while alternative views crept online. The Arab Spring, in 2011, flipped the balance of power to narratives outside the mainstream, as on-the-ground reporting spread on Twitter and Facebook. Then came Black Lives Matter protests, and other stories in which the proliferation of news on social media challenged the coverage of major press organizations. Most recently, in Gaza, Palestinian journalists on the ground have posted livestreams of daily atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military. Across the political spectrum, consumers of news—observing factual discrepancies, biases, and power dynamics—have become fueled by skepticism in their search for truth.
“The press never truly recovered from the moral and professional collapse around the Iraq invasion—that betrayal lingers,” Aboubakr Jamaï, a journalist and the dean of the Donna Dillon Manning School of Global Affairs in Madrid, told me. “Suspicion is on steroids,” he said. And as a result, for many people, “TikTok and Substacks are the most unfiltered platforms when it comes to Western issues.”
To Benjamin Moser, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, frustration with media companies stems in part from audiences growing tired of what he calls the “fake objectivity” of news outlets. “It starts with how you use language and how you respond to language that is deliberately obfuscating something or selling you something you don’t want to buy,” he said. For his part, “I got sick of hate-reading stuff. I got sick of just seeing words like ‘Hamas-run health ministry’ or ‘the Israel-Hamas war.’” But among alternative voices—found on Substacks and social media accounts across the left and right—Moser said he has observed a common sensibility, marked by defiance and an emphasis on transparency.
“It’s indisputable that media right now has a trust problem,” Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, told CNN at a recent conference. The rise of news influencers indicates “that people want a relationship not with an institution but with an individual,” she said. “We have a historical belief, in media, that the brand name of our organization is enough to convey trust, confidence, integrity. But people right now are really looking for relationships with the reporter. They want to understand why someone is saying what they’re saying.”
That has been the experience of Mira Kamdar—formerly of the New York Times, where she was on the editorial board—who started a Substack a few months ago, after having “lost faith” in some of the mainstream outlets for which she’s worked. “I feel like I don’t need to be part of that loudspeaker anymore,” she said. She was comfortable writing off the news, to a targeted audience engaged with her voice. “I have an international perspective, I have a north-south perspective, and that can be valuable to understanding what is happening to the world right now,” she told me. Her aim is “to fold in some of the soul-shattering current events we are living through but with my personal experience.”
For legacy newsrooms, the implications of the trust problem have been complicated. Citing a Gallup poll—a virtually annual revelation that Americans have a record-low opinion of the press—Jeff Bezos, in his capacity as the owner of the Washington Post, declared last fall, “Most people believe the media is biased” and “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.” His takeaway, conveniently: scrap presidential election endorsements. There have also been more earnest reckonings. In April, at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Alex Thomspon—a reporter for Axios and a CNN contributor, who coauthored a recent book on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline—called on the press to own its failure to report critical information. “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows,” he told colleagues. “I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it.” As Jamaï told me, there’s still much work to be done in applying that standard to the latest news: “With what is happening in Iran,” he said, “the first instinct is to be suspicious of the narrative told by legacy media.”
Moser doesn’t think that news organizations’ grappling with credibility will do much to persuade news consumers. “Journalism is in a deep crisis that I don’t think it’s going to emerge from,” he said. But the work of reporting remains important. “What I think will emerge is individuals,” he told me. “What you’re going to lose is journalism as a package.”
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