The Roots of Media’s Cancer

Recent polling has told us something we already see and feel: Americans deeply mistrust the media. But how do we push past the talking point that paints the entire media industry as “the enemy of democracy”? 

Common Sense Society executive editor Chris Bedford offers his thoughts. Tell us what you think! 

— Liz Stiff

What is the root of Americans mistrust of the media? Is it possible to remove ideology and bias entirely from journalism? How can we address the problem and mend trust in this important institution? Or, if the media’s problems are inherent, what is the solution? Let us know in the comments, or tag us in a story on Instagram.

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It’s little surprise American trust in corporate media is at an all-time low. What’s more interesting, is how many believe they actively threaten our freedoms.

Earlier this month, a New York Times and Siena College Research Institute poll found that seventy-four percent of likely voters believe “democracy is currently under threat.” Pushing further, they asked those seventy-four percent what they believed was threatening democracy: President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party, the GOP, the Supreme Court, voting-by-mail, electronic voting, the Electoral College, or corporate media.

Amazingly, a full eighty-three percent said the corporate media themselves are a threat, with fifty-nine percent saying the threat posed is “major,” and another twenty-four percent labeling corporate media a simple “minor threat.” (Queue the punk rock.)

These numbers are far worse than any of the other causes the Times polled—far worse than Trump, Biden, or any of that. So how have we gotten here?

“Bias” is most people’s first answer. Bias certainly plays a role, but personal bias is a permanent human condition; even at a time that’s nearly gone now, when reporters and anchors disguised their biases by avoiding adjectives and other subjective or leading words, bias played a role.

Which stories, for example, are worth covering and which are not? What picture should a newspaper use? A newspaper editor can choose from among the hundreds of pictures of the president, one of him smiling, laughing, confused, angry, sullen—whatever mood or tone he wants to convey.

What experts should be interviewed? Who even counts as an expert in their eyes?

The list goes on, each step informed by the personal, biased judgements of the reporters, editors and producers. But bias has gotten worse, hasn’t it? At least it seems to have. So why is that?

One answer is changing business models. In a recent essay for The New Atlantis, Catholic University adjunct professor Jon Askonsas detailed the history of the 1949 fairness doctrine, which among other things made networks air news coverage as a requisite for their license.

By the dawn of the 1960s, Askonsas writes, astute observers worried the need to fill these news hours “was warping our media diet,” creating what historian Daniel Boorstin called “pseudo-events.”

The fairness doctrine was repealed in 1987, but the creation of the 24-hour, for-profit news network that followed only exacerbated the problem. What did consumers need to know? What is news?

These questions have grown in the internet age, as audiences themselves now take a larger role in deciding what sort of content they’d like to consume.

Years ago when I worked at an online tabloid, we polled our readers’ content preferences. The options ranged from investigative stories exposing corruption, to in-depth policy analysis, to slideshows of beautiful women in bikinis. Unsurprisingly, stories exposing corruption and analyzing policy dominated the poll results, but I could see what those same readers clicked on, and it wasn’t the investigations.

Slideshows are cheaply and easily made, but do you know what isn’t cheap? Hiring experienced investigative reporters to spend weeks on stories that get a fraction of the views.

Media companies are forced to respond to these sorts of pressures: the days of widespread and expensive advertising are gone, and with them the age of large newsroom budgets.

And the changes in advertising didn’t simply leave online news companies more closely dependent on their readers’ exact interests—they bankrupted the country’s local news reporting.

Towns once had thick papers, and even moderately sized cities and states had multiple, profitable, competing outlets, but centralization has now taken hold. Today, cities like New York and Washington hold outsized influence over the American news environment.

Even surviving behemoths like The New York Times and The Washington Post, however, have had to change. The Times, for example, has cut its local reporting budgets, and now focuses its broader energy on offering its readership membership in an exclusive club. “You’re a New York Times reader,” this club seems to say, “and that means you’re a sophisticated and educated person who leans liberal.”

The Times of today offers above all a self-assured and self-indulgent lifestyle, where a sitting U.S. senator’s op-ed whose viewpoint makes readers uncomfortable can trigger firings.

The sort of fear these firings produce, combined with the centralization of media and shrinking budgets, fosters industry groupthink. Why challenge received opinions when it’s dangerous? Why look into difficult stories when no one else has? There’s plenty of money to be made in repeating the “established wisdom” of the chattering classes around you.

This groupthink is exacerbated by the sheer homogeneity of the modern journalistic class. The commanding heights of American society tend to recruit from their own pools. American business, finance, politics, journalism and even military leaders are often groomed by elite liberal institutions.

Skin color, ethnicities and sexual preferences might create the illusion of diversity, but the vast majority of American newsrooms are filled with the over-educated children of affluent families, raised on either of the coasts, but rarely in the middle.

In a 2018 study for The Journal of Expertise, for example, the authors found that “almost half of the [reporters at The New York Times and The Washington Post] attended an elite school” and twenty percent attended an Ivy League school. While about thirty percent of Americans have a college degree, the study found approximately eighty percent of journalists do.

A stroll through the LA Times’s newsroom, for example, might check all the boxes for number of females, Asians, Blacks, lesbians, etc., but if you ask them if they attend church on Sunday, or listen to Jordan Peterson’s podcast, or graduated from a public college, it becomes clear that the diversity is mere illusion. 

When combined with the simple demands of the media industry, this homogeneity creates an intense culture of social pressure.

During the Trump administration, for example, I had a drink with a friend who’d toured The Washington Post’s newsroom earlier that day. “There’s a board in the center of the room,” he said, “that shows the top-performing stories on the site, second by second. Every one of them had ‘Trump’ in the headline.”

Imagine a reporter in a hyper-competitive environment such as this failing to notice what sells and what doesn’t?

But a reporter, anchor, or producer’s opinions on Trump don’t merely influence clicks: disdain for Republicans and conservatives (especially social conservatives) is so palpable in American media newsrooms, it ostracizes those few who try to buck the trends. Even reporters hired from more conservative outlets with the express intent of broadening an organizations’ viewpoint find it impossible to express dissenting opinions without professional and personal repercussions.

This is why even in the remaining towns whose papers have survived, the papers often skew far to the left of the town’s populace.

Above all these things, however—bias, business models, centralization, social pressure, groupthink, homogeneity—towers Donald J. Trump. These myriad other problems have rendered the industry shallow, delicate, and weaker than a free republic deserves, but Trump exposed these faults like no one had before.

Reporters, anchors, and producers share many faults with larger humanity, but they join politicians in possessing incredible egos. Across the industry in the Age of Trump, those egos inflated. Reporters, anchors, and even the once-apolitical business executives began to see resisting Trump as their ethical duty.

Discarding the veneer of ethics that had once shaded the media industry from its critics was justified, they believed, as part of the battle to save America from Trump and his policies. For the first time in the modern media landscape, it was standard for reporters to scream at the president and call him a liar, while anchors nodded along to guests claiming the American government must take “a war-footing” toward the political opposition.

But while the media industry was patting themselves on the back for fighting bravely for our freedoms, Americans saw their churches shuttered, their schools shut down, and their businesses destroyed under Covid. They saw riots and increasing crime.

They saw stories they cared about ignored, while ones they didn’t care about were trumpeted from the mountaintops. And they grew angry. Today, they believe the corporate media is more a danger to our freedoms than any other domestic source.

There’s a need for a proper, functioning, common-sense news media in this country—a literal need. We don’t have that now, and it’s better we know this than simply wander through the fog, but how do we fix it when so much is aligned against us?

There’s no clean answer. In some ways, the problem is curing itself, as the behemoths of corporate media face the shrinking audiences and budgets their failings have produced. In the void, clear-thinking entrepreneurs can create their own products and answer the need for common-sense alternatives.

Frauds will pop up, of course, since the new media environment lacks central control—so the call to discernment will fall on the consumers. Trust is a valuable thing, and corporate media have squandered it. Now, it’s a buyer’s market: make publications fight for your trust. If they want it (and they do need it), they’re going to have to earn it.

How has your local paper dealt with bias? Where do you go for your news? Have we missed any other reasons for mistrust? What do you think is the solution? Have you seen any good pieces on this topic? Let us know in the comments, or tag us in a story on Instagram.