Media Mistrust Has Been Growing for Decades—Does It Matter?

Midway through the 20th century, the news media was among the most trusted institutions in the United States. Today, it sits near the bottom of the list, outflanked only by Congress in most surveys. It’s one of those social facts that elicits a sense of self-evidence (“We needed a survey for that?”). Everybody knows the media has a credibility problem. And seemingly everyone has got a beef with the news.

What happened?

In truth, the origins, diagnosis, and prescription for the public’s trust issues with journalism are complex and contested and—despite the current rhetoric about “fake news”—have been decades in the making.

For instance, how we define “news media” can influence how we understand public attitudes. Surveys show that Americans generally trust local news organizations more than national ones and that they trust the media they themselves consume over and above “the media” in general.

Or consider the range of attributes the public weighs as they consider whether news media can be entrusted to perform certain jobs: Does trust depend on a news outlet’s ability to be transparent? Independent? Accurate?

And assuming we agree on our terms, who’s to blame for the trust deficit?

We ought to be cautious about oversimplifying a decades-long phenomenon. But the broad contours of the news media’s fall from grace can be sketched by summarizing three big trends, each of which interact with the other two: the acceleration of political polarization, the proliferation of new media platforms, and the economic disruption of the news industry.

The impact of polarization

Following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s, a major political realignment began to take place in Washington and in the electorate more broadly, a realignment that today has resulted in partisan ideological consistency on both sides of the aisle. As Democrats increasingly aligned around a liberal/progressive agenda and Republicans aligned along a conservative one, it became more common for voters to evaluate any number of policies and institutions through their partisan lens. Additionally, elected officials and voters started to express more hostility toward the out-group, a phenomenon known as “affective polarization.”

Gallup’s decades-long polling trends illustrate what that looks like in the media context. In 1973, most Americans expressed a high degree of trust and confidence in the news media to do its job. Democrats (74%) and Republicans (68%) were generally on the same page. But by 2023, while the media had lost ground with both groups (and with independents), the gap had widened dramatically, with just 11% of Republicans trusting the media, compared with 58% of Democrats.

Are these polarized views of the news media a response to media behavior? Surely, in part. Over the past half-century, for example, the journalism profession has become more highly educated and more politically lopsided as fewer and fewer in the business tend to identify as Republican. And in the digital news era, news workers tend to cluster in the major coastal (and progressive) urban centers in what one observer called a “game of concentration.”

But political polarization has steadily increased over the last couple of decades, sorting the news audiences’ affective responses along increasingly partisan lines. And a growing number of new entrants into the media business have provided friendly venues for amplifying partisan attacks on the media.

More media choices hasn’t meant more trust

In the early 1970s, when most Americans expressed a high degree of trust in the news, their choices were limited. American households got their news from one of the three major broadcast networks on television or on the radio, and from their local newspaper, which carried a mixture of national and local headlines. This limited-choice environment continued into the 1980s, even with the launch of the first 24-hour news platform, CNN.

But the 1990s saw the emergence of a set of powerful national media brands that would offer alternatives to Americans who wanted something different. “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” nationally syndicated in 1988, put conservative talk radio on the map. Through his acidic commentary, Limbaugh pioneered a particular brand of media criticism that castigated the national press as lapdogs for the Democratic establishment while presenting his own voice as an unvarnished and trustworthy source for disaffected conservative listeners. In the mid-1990s, Fox News debuted, combining CNN’s always-on news and commentary approach with a distinctly conservative voice. MSNBC showed up on the cable dial that same year and soon carved out a liberal niche in response to Fox.

When the bumper crop of internet-born news companies came along in the 21st century, conventional wisdom said that differentiation would breed success. This approach wasn’t altogether new but rather an extension of the niche branding pioneered on radio and cable TV. But inherent in the idea was a perverse incentive structure: These new news programs and websites could burnish their brands through attacking the credibility of other media. Gawker Media’s irreverent style implicated stuffy New York media, while Breitbart News Network’s website verticals included a section entirely devoted to exposing “Big Journalism.” And this helped further funnel at least some Americans into political silos, allowing them to follow the news that reinforced their views and to marginalize the sources they disagreed with.

The rapid rise of social media as a source of news has shaped public attitudes about journalism in ways we are still trying to fully understand. Research has found that social media use has led to burnout and news avoidance, fueled general mistrust of all media, and introduced an epistemic crisis. Although social media users may be exposed to a negative view of news media based on algorithmic incentive structures that reward certain types of messages, there’s little evidence that these individuals are seeing kinder representations of the news media offline. Even as a majority of Americans now turn to social media as a source of news, they are even more wary of these platforms than they are of professional news organizations.

Taken together, it’s unlikely that platforms like Facebook, X (née Twitter), and Instagram have nurtured public trust in the news, even as the promise of the early social web suggested that these tools would foster opportunities for journalists and citizens to interact through crowdsourcing story ideas and soliciting audience feedback.

Economic challenges to the news industry sow doubt about its product

A third major blow to American trust in the news media came as a result of economic disruption to the news industry, a disruption caused in large part by the technological changes in consumer media that were occurring in the 1990s and beyond. Here, as in other cases of external threats, the industry was not a passive actor.

The U.S. newspaper business was at its zenith in the first decade of the 21st century, even as readership had been slowly declining; in 2005, it generated nearly $50 billion a year in advertising revenue, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. But as internet companies such as Craigslist, Google, and Facebook began supplanting services such as classified ads offered by newspapers, audiences—and advertisers—left print. By 2020, newspapers were taking in just $10 billion annually.

Increased competition for a shrinking pot of advertising revenue produced a kind of desperation in the industry and a race to the bottom. To be sure, print had never been an altruistic enterprise—take the metropolitan dailies, for instance, that followed their affluent, White customer base to the suburbs, often abandoning Black audiences in the urban core. But when the Great Recession of 2008 put the squeeze on owners—some of them hedge funds with no real interest in the mission of journalism—many were quick to cut costs by laying off reporters and editors, hollowing out local and metropolitan newsrooms around the country. Newspaper employment went from 71,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020.

Fewer journalists, thinner reporting, and increasingly desperate advertising content did not escape readers’ attention. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans were not only skeptical about the quality of the reporting they saw but also cynical about the business motivations behind the news. It found that no more than half of Americans had confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, and that the public was more likely than not to say that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on.

Media myths obscure both the problems and the solutions

Experts, pollsters, and commentators have done a good job diagnosing the multifaceted issue of American mistrust of the news. So why does it seem to be so difficult for the industry to reverse its fortunes in the court of public opinion?

Some persistent myths have made it difficult to find an obvious way forward.

Political scientist Jonathan Ladd argues in Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters that industry insiders too often embrace the notion that a trusted, independent prestige press is the natural order of things. In fact, prior to the 20th century, few news organizations fit the definition of a prestige press, and many had partisan agendas. Ladd writes that in this historic context, the so-called golden age of American journalism that gave us the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigation is more of an anomaly than a status quo.

Ladd also argues that news leaders fall prey to the myth that trust used to be high because journalists were especially competent at their jobs decades ago. In fact, trust was high for a variety of reasons, including the low-choice media environment described previously, as well as a more forgiving political culture. Though this myth persists, it has begun to crumble as newsrooms reckon with their own legacies of racism, sexism, and elitism.

A third myth views mistrust as inherently a bad thing, a phenomenon that must be reversed. Columbia University journalism historian Michael Schudson has argued that mistrust might mean that journalists are actually doing their jobs, particularly when reporters deliver unwelcome news about a party or politician or public figure. But when our news institutions falter and fail, mistrust should be interpreted as an important signal, not dismissed simply as misdirected partisan noise. And although public mistrust can be uncomfortable for those who are invested in preserving institutions, it’s important to remember that mistrust itself doesn’t automatically lead to worrisome social effects.

The news industry needs to reckon with these myths. To be clear-eyed about the way forward, it needs to be clear-eyed about its past. But reckoning is only one part of the strategy. The 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that three-fourths of Americans believe it’s possible to improve public confidence in the media. So what else should news organizations do to repair relationships with their most skeptical audiences?

For one, continue to put in the spadework of practicing transparency, engaging at the street level, and prioritizing coverage that matters to communities. Strive for accuracy and fairness and acknowledge mistakes when they’re made. There’s no secret trick or shortcut to building credibility. But there’s evidence that these practices can make a difference, at least around the margins. (For example, one study by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin found that using “person-centered” language instead of stereotypical labels can make readers from marginalized groups feel more respected and more likely to trust the news article.)

But even if the industry were to shore up its weaknesses, that might not be enough to fully reverse the current trends. After all, much of the broader social and political environment is not within the industry’s control. There are probably steps the media could take that might build trust with certain groups, but doing so would compromise journalistic values if reporters are seen as trying to pander to audiences.

At the end of the day, public trust is one very important barometer of a healthy press. But it need not be the only one. Journalism at its best is often an antagonist to power, a disquieting force in society, and even an agent that helps communities flourish. The news media must find its way forward without ignoring public opinion—but also without obsessing over it as the final measure of journalism’s performance.

Jesse Holcomb is associate professor of journalism and communication at Calvin University and a former principal adviser to the trust, media, and democracy project at the Knight Foundation.