Who’s to Blame for Distrust in the Media?

Right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh on November 4, 2024. Evan Vucci/AP

On Thursday afternoon, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, on the all-important topic of “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” The Semafor-sponsored event featured one-on-one interviews with such media bigshots as Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times; Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal; Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN; Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor of Fox News; Mehdi Hasan, the editor-in-chief of Zeteo; Cesar Conde, chair of the NBCUniversal News Group; Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission; and Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host who’s now a podcaster.

The prompt for the conversation was a Gallup poll that shows that only 31 percent of Americans have some degree of trust in newsies, a drop from about 70 percent in 1972. Yet there was not much talk of specific innovations that could restore this trust. And it wasn’t until the reception afterward—tuna tartare!—that I realized what had been absent from the hours-long discussion: any consideration of why polls record a decline in trust of the media. I’ll get to that in a moment.

I’m not sure what one could expect from a lineup of media honchos who, if they had a brilliant idea, would probably not want to share it with competitors. But most of the speakers sidestepped the notion that news organizations could whip up something shiny and new to forge stronger bonds with their audiences. Kahn did speak about actions the New York Times has adopted to boost the relationship between its reporters and its readers, such as featuring them on The Daily, the paper’s daily podcast. If you know these folks, you’re more likely to trust their stories, Kahn told the crowd. (Kahn also referred to X as “a cesspool for attacks.”)

His remarks came closest to hitting the target Semafor had set up. Thompson proclaimed that he himself didn’t trust the media and commented, “I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience that is deferential to media.” He touted CNN’s future, noting its growth will not occur on its cable television platform but on the internet. Baier basically defended his daily show as a straight-news operation. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith did not grill him on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that revealed that Fox had pushed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and that showed the world this network is more a propaganda-for-profit shop than a news outlet. Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods that catered to its audience’s paranoia and bias. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

Conde boasted that NBC News is the largest news organization in the nation and hailed its local news operations as means for enhancing trust in the media. (Local reporters often score well on the trust-o-meter.) Maher sought to slay the shibboleth that NPR is too liberal and said one way the network engenders trust is to “show our work” to the audience. Hasan was pressed by Semafor’s Max Tani on why he hasn’t disclosed the investors in Zeteo, the media startup he launched a year ago. He countered that this question has been raised by those who fear his tough coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who want to suggest he’s secretly backed by pro-Arab interests. (He said his investors were friends and relatives, many of whom do not wish to be targeted because of their support.) On the matter of trust, Hasan remarked that many news consumers are “fed up” with the “coziness” they see when mainstream news people conduct interviews with prominent subjects. That produces a “trust deficit,” he asserted.

Tucker, when asked if Washington was freaking out too much about Trump, replied, “Maybe yes, a little bit.” I imagine that thousands of federal workers dismissed abruptly and perhaps illegally from jobs in which they provided essential services might disagree with her—as might needy people overseas who were cut off from food, clean water, and health care necessary for their survival because of the Trump-Musk blitzkrieg on government agencies.

Carr called social media companies “the greatest threat [to free speech] that we have seen over the last several years.” He did not seem to have X in mind and focused instead on the conservative complaint that the Biden administration leaned on these platforms during the Covid pandemic. He also defended his decisions to investigate NPR and PBS over their advertising policies and to revive complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC. He told the audience he would fast-track a probe of how CBS News covered the last presidential election. His remarks were more about vengeance than trust.

A real head-scratcher was Kelly’s place on the list of participants. What could this ex-Foxer tell us about restoring trust in the news media? After all, she endorsed Trump last year and campaigned for him, and Trump is arguably the biggest liar in the history of American politics. No surprise, she had nothing productive to offer. She snarked at CNN (too lefty!) and MSNBC (too, too lefty!). She did a mean-girl thing about Rachel Maddow and sneered that Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had bent the knee for Trump. (Even a broken clock...)

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.” The problem, she claimed, was that every establishment media institution is left-leaning—which is what you’d expect a Trump backer to say. Kelly had not much to share about how the legacy media could regain trust. Her suggestion seemed to be that these outfits ought to cover Trump’s lies as truth. Moreover, her presence at this “summit” was odd. If you want to boost trust in the media, why legitimize a right-wing journalist who became a partisan and helped elect a prodigious liar? By inviting Kelly to this shindig, Semafor indicated it believed she had something to contribute to this important conversation. She didn’t.

Back to the question of why trust in media is low. At the conference, there were crickets regarding the reason for this. A casual glance at the polling provides some insight. In 1972, according to Gallup, 72 percent of Democrats had a great deal or some trust in the media; 68 percent of Republicans felt the same way. Not much of a difference. Independents back then were the least trusting at 59 percent.

Then came a major split. From that point on, the numbers steadily dropped for all three groups. But the decline was sharpest for Republicans. Today, only 12 percent of them trust the media, while 54 percent of Democrats do.

So the overall collapse in trust has been driven most by Republicans losing faith in the media. Trust has fallen for all three groups—though on the chart above you can see there have been times when Democratic trust has rebounded to above 70 percent. Republicans have not hit the 50 percent mark in over 20 years. Take Republicans out of the equation, and the trust-in-media problem looks much less dire.

No one at the conference noted this. What also went unmentioned was that Trump, the GOP, and right-wing media (most notably Fox) have done much through the decades to degrade the national discourse with lies and disinformation, while simultaneously and purposefully encouraging profound distrust and hatred of media outlets that don’t buy their bunk.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Republicans and the right began a crusade against the mainstream media, looking to delegitimize it in the eyes of conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a hero of the ultra-right, excoriated the “liberal media,” which he despised for its coverage of the civil rights movement. Other conservatives assailed the conventional media for their critical reporting on the Vietnam War and Watergate. All of this fueled an extensive and well-planned effort on the right that aimed to discredit the media. In the 1970s, this media-bashing became a bedrock of Republican politics, and it has continued to this day. Trump turbocharged this tradition with his vituperative attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.”

So here’s a basic fact: A long time ago, the right initiated a scheme to encourage distrust and, no surprise, it worked—at least among Republicans and probably among GOP-leaning independents.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the freefalling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story. And as the Republican Party has turned into the MAGA cult, it retains a sharp interest in undermining media that would challenge the “alternative facts,” lies, and disinformation peddled by Trump and his crew. Trump benefits from distrust in the media, and he has deliberately spurred it.

He and his minions don’t want to increase trust in the media because a trusted media would pose a threat to them. During Trump’s first administration, the Washington Post chronicled more than 30,000 lies, false claims, or misrepresentations from Trump. Imagine if Republican voters accepted the newspaper’s portrayal of Trump as a con man. But thanks to the long-running right-wing project to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, Trump and other GOP politicians are insulated from such damning truths.

No one at the Semafor gabfest pondered why this dramatic decrease on the GOP side has occurred. Consequently, there was no discussion of how this distrust was, to a degree, orchestrated by the right. And if you’re not going to look at what’s driving the problem, you’re not going to be able to fix it.

Perhaps Kelly was right: Throw more right-wing slop at Republicans, and they will trust the media more. But would that bring us to a better spot? Distrust of the media is not a nonpartisan issue. If media barons don’t recognize this, they will not likely concoct innovations that effectively address it.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

There was much can-you-believe-it coverage and commentary about the meeting at the White House on Friday between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Donald Trump, who had Vice President JD Vance by his side. Trump and Vance’s berating of Zelenskyy generated headlines and sent chills around the world. They were dumping on a democratic ally before television cameras, suggesting he, not Vladimir Putin, was the obstacle to achieving an end to the brutal and illegal war that Putin launched. It was despicable and demonstrated that what Trump wants most is a conclusion to the war—on terms that greatly favor Russia—so that he can pursue his bromance with the tyrannical and murderous Putin.

Trump’s treatment of Zelenskyy triggered outrage at home and abroad. But during his rant, Trump made a series of rambling and incoherent statements that were outrageous in another way: He suggested that Putin, like him, was a victim of the Russia investigation. Here’s the word salad he served up:

Most people probably cannot follow this drivel. But Trump was saying that Putin—who attacked the 2016 election to help Trump—was falsely accused of wrongdoing by assorted government investigations and media reporting. That is, Putin has been unfairly targeted and tainted by the diabolical Deep State. This is nuts.

As I’ve noted recently (and too many times), it’s beyond reasonable contention that Putin mounted operations to boost Trump in the last three presidential elections. He is a foreign adversary who has waged information warfare against the United States. Yet Trump sees him as a comrade-in-arms who, too, was besmirched by a nefarious cabal of American officials. Trump’s long-term affinity for Putin is a threat to the United States, Ukraine, and the democratic world. It’s even more worrisome that his affection for Putin is fueled by a false sense of shared victimhood. Who knows where that perverse bond will lead us?

“Hot Hot Hot,” Buster Poindexter. I never had the chance to witness a performance of the legendary New York Dolls, the pioneering glam rock, lipstick-loving punkers. But in the 1980s, after the band had fallen apart, David Johansen, its frontman, developed an alter ego: Buster Poindexter, a tuxedo-wearing, pompadour-sporting lounge lizard, who worked the NYC club circuit with an act featuring blues, R&B, and standards. He put on an impressive show, one I saw many times. And on more than one occasion I joined the conga line that he led for his high-energy performance of “Hot Hot Hot,” a song that was an international hit in 1982 for Arrow, a Montserratian calypso and soca musician. I met Johansen a few times back in those days and found him to be a smart and engaging fellow. I was sad to learn of his recent death at the age of 75 of brain cancer. The best way to mark his passing is to play this song and swing those hips.