Long gone are the Walter Cronkite days of the benevolent, trustworthy, authoritative newsman – a source of widely-believed truth and wisdom. For many reasons, faith in the fifth estate has eroded significantly – and that trust deficit is reshaping the role of journalism itself.
In CommPro’s recent panel, “From Trust to Dust: Culture Wars, Tribalism, Partisanship, and the Media,” I sat down to discuss this current state of affairs. Joining me were Frank Sesno, founder of Planet Forward, author of “Ask More” and GWU professor; Eugenia Harvey, Chief DEI Officer and Executive Producer, WNET; and Edmund Lee, media reporter, The New York Times.
The local roots of mistrust
Trust in media has never been a constant. As Frank Sesno noted, “trust is earned and easily burned.” Accumulated over a long period of time through both the reputational and the experiential, perceptions are also tribal. Humans first learn who to trust from their communities, and journalism at that local, micro level has taken the biggest hit in the past decade. Without dedicated coverage what’s happening locally, an important connection is severed.
There’s also been a conflation and conversion of information sourcing, as Eugenia Harvey pointed out. “That trust should begin at home, but home now is this enormous amorphous entity. If I’m not careful and an informed consumer, I don’t know what’s news, what’s opinion, what’s social trending. I’m going to get all this jumbled.”
And “social media landed like a huge stink bomb and changed everything.”
Enter social media
“The commercial internet was the start of this intermediation,” said Ed Lee. “Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast were effectively gatekeepers – it was hard to set up a news organization; doing so required investment and time and trust, which enforced a standard.”
Then the internet came along, and now everyone is a news reporter and publisher – both squeezing the economic pressure on traditional news outlet and muddying the informational waters.
While the cacophony isn’t new – Sesno noted that during the Lincoln/Douglas debates, newspapers aligned with varied political factions contributed to an “incredible shout fest.” The difference now, thanks to social media, is that everybody can both shout and amplify.
Social siloes have also encouraged obsessive behavior around media itself – an anxiety compounded by the actions of the last president. “Presidents have always hated the media but found ways to coexist, but this piling on ‘enemy of the people’ stuff is unprecedented,” said Sesno.
What to “eat” – and when to engage
The consumer’s information diet, the panelists said, is like their food diet. There’s loads of good stuff out there – it’s tasty, provides instant gratification. But it’s not substantive and doesn’t have any nutritional value.
News is no different. “News is information, but not all information is news,” Harvey said.
“When you think about ‘pizza gate’ or Q Anon generally, I question whether you’re going to get trust back by covering the notion that there’s a cabal within DC,” said Lee. “Do you actually report that out, give air to it in any form? When one side believes in falsehoods outright, trust is a different equation.”
The calculus, therefore, is different now. A certain level of news literacy is required among all generations – and all of the panelists agreed that this sensibility appears to be increasingly sharp among the younger generation. Inasmuch as the onus is on the reader, there’s also a obligation for news organizations to be more transparent about the “sausage-making” – giving readers more insight into the conversations that go into determining what is covered, and how. That, the thinking goes, will explain to readers that it’s not a fait accompli.
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June 30, 2021 at 08:26PM
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Skepticism And Sausage-Making: The State Of Eroding Trust In The Media - Forbes
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