Why is trust in media declining? Maybe it’s not us, it’s you

Efforts to explain the decline in public trust in media tend to focus on the media’s own undeniable flaws, as American journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out this week.. But what if such analysis actually obscures what’s really happening? “Fundamentally, ‘trust in media is declining because the media is bad’ is a fallacious explanation,” argued Yglesias. “Not only is there little evidence that the media has gotten worse since the high-trust, pre-Vietnam era, I think there’s considerable evidence that it’s gotten better.”

Yglesias was riffing off a recent New Yorker article by Louis Menand headlined “When Americans lost faith in the news”. Looking for explanations, Menand pointed to the current poisonous state of American politics. “The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years,” he wrote. “The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means. Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, 72 per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is 34 per cent. Among Republicans, it’s 14 per cent.”

Trust in media has declined in Ireland too, although at 52 per cent it remains relatively high in comparison with other European countries, and significantly better than the dismal US numbers. None of which should be any cause for complacency; the shortcomings of Irish media are many. Menand is correct, though, about the corrosive impact of populist narratives: the Trumpist framing of media as the enemy is commonplace on both the far right and far left of contemporary Irish politics.

But even a cursory examination of media history dispels any notion of a lost Edenic past. A new book, City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington, reveals the extent of collusion between American postwar governments and media organisations in keeping the truth about American interference in the Middle East and Latin America concealed from their readers and viewers. The people who ran media and those who ran government came from the same social strata and held identical ideological views. Add in the structures of so-called “pack” journalism, whereby a pool of correspondents collaborate closely with government officials on generating stories, and you don’t need to have read Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent to know what the outcome was.

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The exact same factors, on a more modest scale, applied here in Ireland, and many of them still do. Studies of modern Irish social history focus on the groundbreaking work of a handful of dogged investigative and campaigning journalists in uncovering institutional abuse, political corruption and corporate malfeasance. Less attention is paid to the failure of so many newspapers and broadcasters from the 1950s onwards to face down powerful interests.

Less attention is paid to the failure of so many newspapers and broadcasters from the 1950s onwards to face down powerful interests

—  Matt Yglesias

When it comes to the present moment, though, Yglesias is probably right when he answers his own rhetorical question about why so many stories are misleading, while important facts are under covered.

“I’m afraid that the main problem is the news-reading audience, which simply does not agree that the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light,” he wrote. “I don’t know why people read what they read, but they are mostly not seeking actionable intelligence about the state of the world and therefore don’t care that much about accuracy.”

[ No laughing matter: The Snapper asks troubling questions that weren’t noticed at the time ]

This grim diagnosis has a ring of truth for those of us who pay attention to how certain news stories go viral while others are ignored.

“The term ‘news media’ is a capacious abstraction that contains multitudes,” wrote conservative commentator Brink Lindsey recently. “But when we look at the enterprise taken as a whole, the commendable efforts of the truth seekers and fact finders are overwhelmed by the flood of sensationalistic infotainment bullshit – a flood that panders to the public’s worst instincts and whips both sides into a mutually antagonistic frenzy, all to maximise media company revenues.”

This genie isn’t going back in any bottle, but at least we may be beginning to understand it a little better

Lindsey is less sanguine than Yglesias about the current state of media in the US (and, by inference, around the world). His conclusion is surprising from a lifelong Republican and self-described libertarian. “There is a fundamental misalignment between profit-seeking and democracy’s need for a well-informed public,” he wrote. “That misalignment can be mitigated when profit-seeking is appropriately constrained, but in today’s competitive free-for-all for eyeballs, clicks, and ratings, the result is informational anarchy in which truth is hopelessly outmatched.”

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Market deregulation, technological innovation and new forms of aggressive, data-driven entrepreneurialism have all transformed the media landscape in so many ways that it becomes hard even to agree a definition of what “media” is (most of the articles mentioned here were published on Substack, a platform that didn’t exist six years ago). This genie isn’t going back in any bottle, but at least we may be beginning to understand it a little better.