Why don't we trust the media? Allow me to bloviate.
A Harper's forum set my grey hairs on fire and made the ink in my veins boil
If you love good writing and provocative journalism you must read Harper’s.
With that said this month’s cover piece “Why Don’t We Trust the Media?” was like reading a murder mystery wherein four “smart” journo-detectives beckon every suspect for grilling in front of the fireplace except for the real killer who runs free.
The chatter of Harper’s impressive panel of young panelists described as media “observers” missed one important suspect.
Why is the media not trusted? Here are their suspects :
COVID.
Credibility errors.
False Equivalency.
Information silos.
And more.
When Jack Shafer, a Slate media critic points out in the distant past of the sixties, “trust in the media was incredibly high,” he then moved on to opine that mainstream print’s coverage of the social turmoil of that era did not cover race, sex, and inequality but rather, simply rewrote government press releases.
None had ever seen Rolling Stone or the Village Voice or The Guardian or the Post’s Watergate coverage I suspect.
And then the paradox arises.
According to the panel the decline of trust had to do with papers evolving into community watchdogs reporting unpleasant social truths.
What?
I was born in 1955 and reborn when I was 21 and after watching “All the President’s Men” at the University of Arizona’s Gallagher theater in 1976.
I was blessed to work during the golden age of the rise and fall of print media. In the late nineties as the young internet metastasized, Craigslist killed the classifieds and newsrooms began to turn into ghost towns, I was again blessed to be holding on because I was internationally syndicated, the popular public face of my paper in my community and the author of a well-read weekly humor column. As I headed into retirement in the 2020s and a second life here on Substack as a columnist, the media landscape was radically different from the one I entered in 1979.
And here is where I offer my view on why the media, the mainstream media, died a slow death due to a gradual loss of credibility.
That perception was amplified by the right around the clock.
I was raised on Walter Cronkite. One voice in our one town square. Reliable. Stodgy. Paternal. Our great white news father. It was the crazy rabid right wing town cranks who bitched about the newspapers and peddled their propaganda in their little John Birch bookstores and bought their “GET US OUT OF THE UN NOW” billboards on the edge of town.
And then in the seventies the rich deduced they could sway opinion by funding alternative media like TV and AM radio news networks whose mission was to sow distrust of the mainstream media. Coincidentally polling at the time suggested a third of us began to suspect ABC, CBS, NBC and the big city big grey dailies were all communist organs. Now where did that spring from?
Uneducated viewers trusted conservative Rush Limbaugh and Fox News because ever since those partisan voices were spawned out of the wallets of monied interests, the chief mission of them has not been to present fair and balanced coverage, but to condition their audiences to accept far-right lunacy as fact and to degrade mainstream media and centrist and progressive thought at every turn, every day, every hour. After decades of this war on mainstream media and centrist voices they have won.
Walter Cronkite and Walter Lippman (google them) have been long forgotten and their idealistic acolytes starved to financial death and replaced by thousands of billionaire funded voices arguing radical perspectives that serve their donors.
Why don’t we trust the media? If you were an oligarch would you want a citizenry that “trusts” the media?
Mr. F, you could not possibly be more on target here. You've got a couple of years on me, but I grew up roughly the same time as you and saw these exact same things happening, Extremist ideas and concepts presented as fact, while policies and ideals that had actual experience and success behind them (such as Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, and most recently marriage equality) treated as radical, destructive agendas. While Reagan's dismantling of the "Fairness Doctrine" is certainly part of it, you hit the nail on the head by identifying huge money interests buying so much airtime that people are unable to hear, see, or read anything that contradicts their stilted, slanted worldview. Right now people across the country are discovering that the dismantling of the Federal Government doesn't just affect "the bad people" (whoever they consider that to be) but ALL of us. As usual, you are exactly right. More's the pity.
In the Huntley/Brinkley/Chronkite era functioning underneath the national scene was a plethora of local, even hyper local, enterprises that a big percent of local folks read - they represented a common local story purveyor widely accepted as accurate and informative more avidly read than the bigs. Up here in Oracle the San Manuel Miner served that audience reliably for decades covering the rise of Big Copper (Magma) and its unions (including Mine-Mill); company town San Manuel build out (by Del Webb); community institutions like food banks and mutual aid groups, churches; schools and youth sports. The Miner is still around (part of Copper Area publications). I know because I saw the patriarch of the enterprise, Jim Carnes, delivering the weekly paper to our local coffee shop - Way of Bean Coffee Club. But these days local communications are far more fragmented, with a jigsaw puzzle of FB posts, websites, and substacks (which is my thing: frankpierson.substack.com). Some great journalism was advanced by the Miner over many decades covering local stories with national connections/implications. None of the local mix rises to the standard right about now.