Trust in the media has never exactly been high, but it’s collapsing to truly subterranean levels. Media wallow in the same amount of distrust as politicians and used-car salesmen. But, with typical legacy media arrogance, they refuse to even consider that the problem just might be them.
Instead, the Columbia Journalism Review blames…you guessed it: Donald Trump.
The results of a new Knight Foundation and Gallup poll released on Tuesday won’t come as a huge surprise to most journalists: Trust in the media is down. Again.
A majority of those who were surveyed said they had lost trust in the media in recent years, and more than 30 percent of those who identified themselves as being on the conservative end of the spectrum said they had not only lost faith in the media, but they “expect that change to be permanent.” According to a separate Gallup poll from earlier this year that tracked trust in major institutions, newspapers and television news were among the lowest, exceeded only by Congress.
You’d think any profession with its reputation that far down the toilet might at the very least consider a little soul-searching. But, no. Just screech and point the finger at the Bad Orange Man.
Is this decline in trust related to the repeated attacks on “the lying media” by President Trump and his supporters, who like to describe the press as “the enemy of the people?”
It’s not as if people aren’t telling the media exactly why they don’t trust them.
When people were asked why they don’t trust the media, about 45 percent referred to things like inaccuracy, bias, “fake news,” and “alternative facts,” the latter two being common descriptions given by Donald Trump and members of his administration. A general lack of credibility and the fact that reports are “based on opinions or emotions” are two of the other reasons given for a loss of trust. About 10 percent of those surveyed also mentioned sensationalism, “clickbait,” or hype as a negative factor. Interestingly, twice as many young adults (18 to 34) as older respondents said politically focused coverage or partisan bias was a factor in their lack of trust.
People are also telling the media what they should do to restore their reputation.
The survey asked people whether they thought their trust in media might be restored somehow, and almost 70 percent of them said yes—60 percent of those who identified themselves as Republicans and 86 percent of those who said they were Democrats. And what might restore that lost trust? Respondents chose a variety of factors such as accuracy (including “not reporting stories before [a news outlet] verifies all the facts and being willing to correct mistakes it makes”), as well as lack of bias, and transparency (including “providing fact-checking resources and providing links to research and facts that back up [the news outlet’s] reporting”).
In other words, basic journalism. The sort of stuff journalists are supposed to learn in their first semester of basic newsroom practise.
But that’s all a bit too much for opinion-makers drunk on their own self-righteousness. Far easier to just scream helplessly at the sky about the Bad Orange Man.
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