In the 1970s, when Gallup first began asking Americans about how much they trusted the media, about 70% said they had a great deal or a fair amount of trust. The single most trusted person in America at that time was broadcaster Walter Cronkite.
“Imagine that now,” said Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton, speaking Thursday in Washington, D.C., where media luminaries gathered to wrestle with the question of what can be done to restore trust in the news.
The assembly was eclectic to say the least, with podcaster Megyn Kelly and Fox News anchor Bret Baier appearing, as well as new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and editors and CEOs from media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, NBC and CNN.
At the event organized by Semafor, with support from Gallup and the Knight Foundation, the participants discussed the challenges facing the industry and what they are doing to rebuild trust. The organizers noted that while people often blame the rhetoric of President Donald Trump for the decline in trust, there are multiple factors involved.
“When you pull back, there are these vast technological shifts that have totally remade the industry, and even the fights happening now in the White House press room, ultimately there are these deep shifts that Donald Trump didn’t create and that we’re all living with,” Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, said.
Clifton, with Gallup, said that compared to other institutions, trust in media is either last or next-to-last of all institutions surveyed, and it’s been a long, steady decline over a half-century. “Most people think the crash in trust in news has been MSNBC and Fox and all of that. That train (of decline) started coming back in about 1972, when media was the most trusted single institution in the world.”
The participants each took the stage separately and answered questions posed by Semafor in a format that helped keep the conversation measured, even though Kelly had fiery things to say about the legacy media outlets (CNN would have to fire everyone in order to rebuild its credibility, Kelly said moments after CNN Worldwide CEO Mark Thompson left the stage), and Carr’s FCC has launched an investigation into NPR.
How the NYT is building trust
Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, told the audience that one way his publication is trying to build trust is by letting readers know more about the writers through videos and appearances on podcasts, and establishing their credentials to write on a subject. But he also said that there is space for the industry to play offense, to defend journalists’ work and to push back when they are unfairly criticized.
Asked if the Times should hire more conservatives, Kahn said, “I do want to hire more people who come from different geographies, different personal experience, different background, different schools, different education, whatever it is, because .... part of your own personal experience, often where you grew up, who you grew up with, whether you’re part of a religious family, did you have any military experience, those actually can open your eyes and ideas to a different kind of journalism, a different perspective on the news. We should have diversity in that way. It is important.”
But, he added, “That’s not the same thing as saying I’m going to go out and look for someone who voted for Trump and put them on my staff. As a newsroom, I don’t think that’s exactly the right incentive.”
Kahn was critical of the president’s recent decision to restrict The Associated Press’ access, but called the administration’s probe of federal spending a “great journalistic opportunity.”
“This guy makes a lot of news, and it’s really interesting, and some of it is fact-challenged and we have to correct that in as much real-time as we possibly can. But they are also opening up lines of inquiry into federal agencies, and the functions of government that none of us have thought about since civics class, and is now part of the news cycle, where we can dig in deeply. What does this agency do? When did it get started? What’s its mission? Is it still living up to its mission? How much funding does it get? How much oversight or control does Congress have? Those are all issues in the news now, and they are all sort of unearthed by this disruptive agenda of Trump. So is it good for the news business? I think it probably is.”
Why is NPR considered liberal?
The CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, was asked what she would point to in order to counter complaints that NPR is too liberal. She said she would point out NPR’s newscasts and morning show, and the fact that they have 10 million weekly listeners across every part of the country. “We don’t do opinion programming,” she said. She added that “not everything you hear on public radio is NPR,” noting that local communities decide on their own programming, and people don’t always understand the difference.
“At NPR, our goal is not to be trusted, it’s to be trustworthy,” she said. Asked to explain what that means, Maher said it’s important to be able to “show your work,” similar to how academics include citations in scholarly papers to build trust. Even if readers don’t check each citation, they know they are there. NPR has also brought in additional editors and tracks how often they publish or broadcast stories on a certain topic to ensure fairness. “We really have to advocate for what we do and explain what we do,” Maher said.
Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, told the audience, “If they don’t trust us, it’s on us to win that trust back” and said that the Journal builds trust with its audience by approaching stories as observers, not participants, and being radically focused on the audience’s needs — “What are we doing that is useful for readers? What are we telling them that they didn’t know? What are we telling them that adds value to their lives?” She also said that the media has “to not be afraid of the consequences of what you’re going to publish.”
The media was slow to realize that their audience was becoming fragmented as they were increasingly offered other options for news, she said.
News without emotion
Semafor’s Smith asked Megyn Kelly if she might have lost trust with viewers because she came out in support of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh. Kelly said that her views on YouTube last month were 147 million, not far behind those of CNN, which had 155 million, and in November her YouTube numbers had eclipsed several news outlets. “I’m not having a trust issue,” she said, arguing that the legacy media had created a trust problem for itself.
Baier, who has been a Fox anchor since taking over for Brit Hume 16 years ago, said that he’s not an “opinion guy” and works to present the news without emotion. “Over the years, that has been a problem (at other outlets) — some people got emotional about it and lost half the audience.”
“‘If you build it, they will come’ works,” he said, noting that his show this week included interviews with French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and he is interviewing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday. “Big news events should drive news coverage and not the controversy of the day,” Baier said.
Justin B. Smith, Semafor’s co-founder and CEO, said the genesis of the event was the decision by Washington Post Jeff Bezos to not publish an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race. He invited Bezos to participate in a discussion and did not get a response, but decided to proceed with the event anyway. It turned out to be timely, coming on the heels of the most recent controversy involving Bezos, his decision to direct the Post’s opinion pages to focus on support of free trade and individual liberty.