The Decline of Trust in the News
As Gerald Baker wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, the biggest threat to modern journalism is the journalists. He pointed out that bias and incompetent reporting are the major causes of media distrust these days. But while those factors are highly important, they aren’t the entirety of the news business’ failure.
Is that anything new? No. As Eric Burns describes in his book Infamous Scribblers — the term George Washington used to characterize the reporters of his day — American journalism began on the shakiest of ground. Mr. Burns begins the book by writing: “It was the best of times it was the worst of journalism, and it is no small irony that the former condition led directly to the latter, that the golden age of America’s founding was the gutter age of American reporting.”
In Burns’ book he writes how Sam Adams was making stuff up about the British to sell his broadsheet newspaper. And Burns goes to some length to explain how Washington was beset by nagging reporters. Does it all sound familiar?
Nothing much has changed since the Revolutionary War.
We thought, back in the 1960s and 1970s, that we lived in an age when reporting could be relied upon. My family lived in the New York City suburbs and we had the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Daily News — to mention only a few — and Walter Cronkite or the Chet Huntley-David Brinkley partnership were on television every day telling us, in Cronkite’s words, “that’s the way it is.” It was a treat for me, as a kid, when my father brought home the New York Times and we read it together.
But the news was always infested with politics and now it is even more so.
What should be the role of the reporter or broadcaster? It should be only to describe facts, not inject their opinions. The answers to the who, what, where, when and why questions should be all that mattered.
The real question is what relationship a reporter should have to the government. The reporter should be a skeptic of everything the government does and be an adversary of the government. Those alliances are all that are found in modern (or ancient) journalism.
Media outlets such as this one and others are supposed to be writing commentary, not news. But ABC, NBC, CBS, and major newspapers entirely take sides on political issues which they should not do. Even Fox News does that in most of its stories.
It is a market that fights for readership every moment of every day. Even successful media outlets such as Fox News play to their readers in simple terms.
In April 2025 the Media Research Center, which tracks media bias against conservatives, found that 92 percent of major news stories about President Trump in the first hundred days of his second term were negative. That study resulted from a review of 1,841 statements made by journalists, anchors, reporters, and experts on ABC, CBS, and NBC, dismissing any non-partisan guests. It also analyzed 899 stories aired during evening news broadcasts from January 20 to April 9, finding that 1,692 of the statements were negative.
Clearly, President Trump brings much of it on himself. He responds to any slight even from show business nobodies and athletes. If we believe that the president brought about, say, 40 percent of those statements and stories, how do we account for the other 52 percent? It cannot all be Trump Derangement Syndrome, but that plays a large part in coverage of Mr. Trump.
It’s more than TDS. The fact is that reporters, like most people, are intellectually lazy. They follow the herd and, in what passes today for newsrooms, the herd rules the day.
When the Washington Post announced it was laying off hundreds of its staff, the announcement brought an old fear back into the news business. It’s a fear that burdens people who aren’t doing their jobs and aren’t pleasing the market for news.
It is a market that fights for readership every moment of every day. Even successful media outlets such as Fox News play to their readers in simple terms. Fox has succumbed to the “click bait” theory of news broadcasting and, as a result, it has become little more than a tabloid like you can find at supermarket checkout stands.
Newspapers try for a “scoop,” a story that beats the competition to get the “news” out. But newspapers — and many other media outlets — are not popular. Only a few houses in my neighborhood have newspapers delivered every day. Too many people rely on social media for news, which is notoriously inaccurate.
Even the best reporting is infected with politics. I read The Economist because it is the best-written news magazine in English on the planet. But I have to filter out its dedication to the cause of “climate change” and its hatred of Mr. Trump.
Good news coverage begins with good editors. As I discovered when I was the editor of Human Events almost two decades ago, the greatest power an editor has is in what he chooses not to cover. I deep-sixed stories that I thought weren’t newsworthy or didn’t fit our agenda. That covered a lot of ground. We concentrated on bringing conservatives into the limelight and, for a time, we were monstrously successful. But, again, we were writing with an agenda, which the major news outlets shouldn’t be.
But it nevertheless comes down to reporting. However journalism is taught in college and high school, there’s no substitute for stories that do not answer the basic questions of who, what, where, when, and why. Even journalism schools don’t teach good grammar and a dedication to the five basic questions.
There’s no answer — other than market forces — to compel newspapers and other media outlets to better editing and reporting. It has always been thus and there’s no cure for it.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin: