Trust in mainstream media is at rock bottom. Can it be fixed?
Why so many news consumers are turning to individual voices and away from institutions
Last week, I asked you, the readers of American Crisis, to tell me about your media diet. Where are you getting the news and information you find reliable and important?
Your comments were illuminating. Many of you mentioned how much you have come to rely on independent — not institutional — voices. Many of you mentioned writers like Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, Judd Legum and Marisa Kabas, among many others. You also mentioned podcasts and individual columnists.
Many of you expressed disillusionment, or even rage, at “Big Journalism,” or mainstream media — or whatever you want to call the big traditional institutions.
You’re disgusted by commercial or billionaire ownership, and angry about journalism driven by corporate concerns over public mission.
And some of the decision-making about headlines and story-framing infuriates you. I heard from a number of people, for example, about a major front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times, headlined, “Inside Biden’s Losing Bets on Immigration.”
As one observer texted me in frustration, “Why is the Times doing this now when the current administration has lost a ton of faith on that same issue and just about all others?” The immigration story was above the fold on the Sunday front page (translation: this is considered top-of-the-line news), and took up two pages inside the front section (translation, especially in December: Maybe it will win an award).
Don’t get me wrong. This is a legitimate story, on a crucial topic; and it’s very well-reported and written. Still, the timing and prominence seems tone deaf. (Big Media apparently never tires of finding fault with Biden.) For many, it’s a turnoff.
“Where do I get my news now? And I am speaking as a lifelong newspaper reporter and editor,” wrote Laurie Hertzel. Her answer, in brief: “Substack!” Laurie noted that she does still subscribe to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and others, but it’s the individuals “who give me hope.”
“Even though some of them are written in an overly partisan way, they all have good reporting and information and focus on the most important stories of the moment.”
And those of you who did mention big outlets often focused on individual columnists.
“Most NYT opinion writers are duds,” wrote Pam Shira Fleetman. “But then there are Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Goldberg and M. Gessen. It’s for those three that I keep my subscription.”
All of this was on my mind last week when I heard research presented at a conference on the future of journalism at the Paris University known as Sciences Po. I was even asked by a student-questioner to address a poll that, he said, shows more confidence in ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) than in the media. I haven’t seen that particular research myself, but I do know that people are disgusted and turned off by corporate media.
So I was impressed with a presentation by Liz Kelly Nelson, who founded Project C — the “c” is for creator — which addresses these kinds of questions and tries to find solutions.
Nelson goes back a long way in traditional media — she once was a blogger at the Washington Post in the days when the “digital” newsroom was across the Potomac from the “real” newsroom.
One of her slides — you can see it here — really stuck with me. Based on research by Ben Reininga while he was a Neiman Berkman-Klein fellow this year, it compares how people perceive the individual “creator-journalists” — whether podcasters, YouTubers or newsletter writers — as compared to traditional journalism. It begins to get at how to break through the problem of news avoidance, the idea that we’ve all heard expressed as “I have to shut it all out. It’s too depressing and biased.”
Liz and I agree that traditional journalism organizations have a lot to learn here, and that taking this seriously could make a big difference in making citizens more well-informed. We’ve all heard about “low information” voters — they tend to do damage once they get to the polling place. In my view, they have a lot to do with why we have Trump 2.0.
I was thinking about all this when I got in a taxi to come home from JFK airport in New York City. It’s a cliche, of course, that journalists interview cabbies and draw too-sweeping conclusions from their comments. I’ll try not to do that here.
But I did talk politics and news (especially immigration and the economy) with the young man at the wheel— a thirty-something immigrant from India who has been in the US for almost two decades, is married with three children, including a newborn, and who votes. He was troubled by how tough it is to make a living, said he thinks Trump has gone too far on immigration, and noted how expensive everything has become. He shares a taxi medallion with his uncle after an unhappy stint with UBER.
He was impressively knowledgeable about everything from Texas gerrymandering efforts to the Supreme Court’s consideration of birth-right citizenship, so I asked him what his news sources are. Certain individuals on TikTok and on other social-media platforms, he said, and a number of podcasters from all over the political spectrum. These are the “creator-journalists” that Liz Nelson was talking about.
What about traditional media? He came back with the usual complaints — biased, not trustworthy, not interesting to him. Trump, he noted, has been on a longterm campaign to brand traditional journalism — the broadcast networks, the big newspaper companies, CNN, NPR, etc — as “fake news.”
“You don’t know whether a lot of (the news) is true or if it’s propaganda,” he told me. He also sounded sincerely enthusiastic about how much he loves the United States, despite all its problems, and how glad he is to be living and raising a family here.
Liz Kelly Nelson thinks that the question of institutional media versus “creators” doesn’t need to be an either-or situation.
Traditional media still has great strengths, like investigative reporting teams, several layers of careful editing, fact-checking, legal departments, and institutional knowledge. Creator-journalists are especially good at engendering trust and loyalty, as many of you noted so eloquently.
“This isn’t rocket science. Audiences have changed,” she told me later. We agreed to spend some time working on this. I’ll keep you informed.
My own presentation about journalism ethics, with my Columbia colleague Julie Gerstein, went well. Here’s the Columbia Journalism Review series that it was based on. Paris was beautiful and wonderful, and I am very appreciative of your suggestions about places to visit and where to eat. I wish I’d had a lot more time.
Separately, I want to call your attention to a worthy two-part series done by The Media and Democracy Project. It focuses on a real rarity these days — a newspaper editorial board that has thoughtfully called for Trump’s impeachment and resignation, given what’s happened especially in this second term. It’s The Sentinel in Aurora, Colorado. The Media and Democracy Protect series includes an interview with the paper’s publisher, Dave Perry.
Readers, as always, I read your comments with sincere interest and am appreciative to have you along for this wild ride as American democracy teeters.
Please let me know what you think about the ideas here, especially as Liz Nelson and I begin some brainstorming about how this research could have a positive effect on our society. And let me know what you’d ask or tell a New York Times senior newsroom editor, if you had his ear for an hour or so; I may be having such a conversation in the next few weeks.
As always, I welcome your ideas.
Thanks to the many new subscribers. I am thrilled to have you here. Many readers have thanked me for removing the paywall so that all can read and comment. I want to keep it that way, so I hope, if you’re able, you’ll support this effort, as detailed in the “What I Ask of You” section, below. Thanks for considering it. Thanks also for being here, and for your participation and comments.
My background: I am a Lackawanna, NY native who started my career as a summer intern at the Buffalo News, my hometown daily. After years as a reporter and editor, I was named the paper’s first woman editor in chief in 1999, and ran the 200-person newsroom for almost 13 years. Starting in 2012, I served as the first woman “public editor” of the New York Times — an internal media critic and reader representative — and later was the media columnist for the Washington Post. These days, I write here on Substack, as well as for the Guardian US, and teach an ethics course at Columbia Journalism School. I’ve also written two books and won a few awards, including three for defending First Amendment principles.
The purpose of ‘American Crisis’: My aim is to use this newsletter (it started as a podcast in 2023) to push for the kind of journalism we need for our democracy to function — journalism that is accurate, fair, mission-driven and public-spirited. That means that I point out the media’s flaws and failures when necessary.
What I ask of you: Last fall, I removed the paywall so that everyone could read and comment. I thought it was important in this dire moment and might be helpful. If you are able to subscribe at $50 a year or $8 a month, or upgrade your unpaid subscription, that will help to support this venture — and keep it going for all. Thank you!
In order to be informed through substack, it would cost the average person close to $1,000 a year. That would give someone a well rounded, many sided, (to mix metaphors) view of news and opinion. And that would be a huge luxury for most people.
I think it is imperative that we try to come up with a way to inform without relying on a model of capitalism that has all but paywalled the average person out. Using Tik Tok, IG, Twitter, The Joe Rogan podcast (and all the other copy cat versions) is no way to create an informed populace. I don't have the answer. I am more than a little worried though for the under 35-40 year olds when it comes to "information".
The trouble with the Times and other mainstream entities is that, despite knowing that he is a murderer and a thief bent on the ruin of our commonwealth, they give him a clean slate on which to perpetrate new lies and atrocities every day. They may question the veracity vel non of his latest outburst, but they never make the point-- any trial lawyer would make it--that his past record of overwhelming mendacity gives the reader every reason to reject his most recent lie. The only way for papers like the Times to address this shortcoming would be to dedicate two front-page columns everyday to listing, say, 50 of Trump's most egregious lies and crimes over his career. My father used to say that democracy's most critical vulnerability was "Not the big lie, but the big forget." Sadly, our mainstream media enables this disfunction by failing to remind its readers of the sheer multiplicity of Trump's endless series of malefactions.