Republic of Distrust

How the Media Can Escape Its Doom Loop of Distrust

Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller argues that news needs more transparency and accountability to regain public trust. Greater media literacy is also essential.

By Bill Keller October 23, 2024

This column is a part of Republic of Distrust, a series about the loss of trust in American institutions and what can be done to restore it.

Walter Cronkite was often described as “the most trusted man in America” in the 1960s and ‘70s. The avuncular CBS News anchor was admired for reporting fairly and accurately, even when his view challenged the official line or popular opinion. After a 1968 reporting trip to Vietnam, for example, Cronkite told his 30 million viewers that the American war there was an unwinnable “stalemate,” a judgment that helped turn the public against the war. Conservative pundit George Will said the history of journalism in our era could be divided into “Before Cronkite” and “After Cronkite.” “After Cronkite” was characterized by a precipitous decline in the public’s trust.

In the bitterly fractious, misinformation-saturated, social-mediated America of 2024, it’s hard to think of a consensus candidate for the title of most trusted, but it would probably not be a journalist. The authors of one Gallup survey last year declared their assessment of public trust and confidence in mass media “the grimmest in Gallup’s history.” Among Gallup’s ranking of the 10 US civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process, mass media and Congress were tied for the least trusted.

America is not alone in this. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, based on an online survey of 32,000 adults in 28 countries, found that 64% believe journalists “are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

I know something about the fragile nature of journalism’s bond with the public. I worked at the New York Times for 30 years, including eight years as executive editor — years of existential trauma in the news business, and introspection at the Times.

I inherited the top job thanks in large part to two scandals that put our audience’s trust at risk: a rogue reporter who had fabricated dozens of stories under the unwatchful eyes of his editors, and gullible coverage of White House assertions that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. My welcome-to-the-job gift was a thick binder produced by a team of editors prescribing measures to restore the paper’s credibility.

Its central proposal was to create the new position of public editor, an independent ombudsman paid to critique the Times in its own pages. Newsroom editors, who tend to think second-guessing the Times is their job, learned to live with our new internal monitor, but it often felt like an exercise in institutional masochism. In one memorable headline, our first public editor, Daniel Okrent, posed the question, “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” and answered it in the first paragraph: “Of course it is.” For readers who went beyond that attention-grabbing overture, Okrent explained that the Times, in its news pages, reflected the interests, social mores and tolerance of its cosmopolitan home city. It was liberal in the sense of open-mindedness. But, predictably, conservatives took it as a confession of a partisan agenda.

Republic of Distrust

Read more from Republic of Distrust, a series about the loss of trust in American institutions and what can be done to restore it.

(The business side of the Times actually hired a consultant to ask the same question – was the Times “liberal”? A majority of the readers polled said yes, but an even larger majority said the paper was also “fair.” I could live with that.)

Trust in the media did not evaporate; it fractured. A YouGov survey in May found that for the most part, Americans profess some confidence in the news sources they personally consume, much as voters who regard Congress with contempt nonetheless keep reelecting their incumbent lawmakers. Democrats are more likely to trust what we have come to refer to as “mainstream media” — the major daily newspapers, the TV networks, CNN and NPR, et al. — while Republicans, with Donald Trump serving as their cheerleader, scorn those outlets as “fake news” and rely mostly on the smug right-wingers of Fox and Newsmax. Young readers are more likely than older readers to get their news from social media, and more likely to trust it.

What’s missing in this atomized world is a common pool of information. Another survey, this one by the Pew Research Center in 2019, found Americans so divided that they “not only disagree over plans and policies, but also cannot agree on the basic facts.”

The mistrust feeds — and feeds on — the extreme polarization of our politics.

Lee Rainie, a Pew veteran and director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University in North Carolina, says many Americans fear a collapse of what he calls the “civic information ecosystem” — the shared understanding and values that enable a functioning democracy. Writing in the journal Daedalus, Rainie said: “Alarmingly, 73 percent of Americans now believe that political partisans do not operate in a shared reality, and a similar proportion of adults believe the party partisans do not occupy a shared moral universe.”

“The endpoint of this catalog of woe,” he concluded, “is that citizens’ gloom extends into the coming decades: they foresee further decline in the United States’ role in the world, along with growing inequality, polarization, and strife.”

From Pamphleteers to Arsonist-Hackers

American newspapers evolved from gossipy, homespun almanacs in Ben Franklin’s day, to polemical pamphlets in the Tom Paine era, to the sensation-mongering yellow press of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, to the world according to Walter Cronkite. Mistrust has been with us from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson famously declared in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” But 20 years later, after a hostile press exposed Jefferson’s sexual relationship with an enslaved woman, the founding champion of the First Amendment sounded like a precursor to Donald Trump: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” he wrote. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” (I can testify from personal experience: Nothing tests your faith in the press like the experience of being written about.)

The high-minded ideals taught in journalism schools today — accuracy, fairness, independence — are relatively recent, a novelty of the late 19th century, when Adolph Ochs purchased the struggling (and hyphenated) New-York Times, promising to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect or interest involved.”

Along its trajectory, American journalism has been reshaped by successive leaps of technology, each rendering the news more accessible and more abusable. “Yes, the rise of the printing press gave new life to those who practiced and promoted folklore, quackery, witchcraft, and alchemy by allowing them to propagate their crackpot theories cheaply and widely,” Rainie wrote. “But it also created the conditions that eventually gave rise to the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution.”

Likewise, radio, network television, cable and, most dramatically, social media have inundated us with disorienting tides of misinformation and its more intentional cousin, disinformation, but they also have made us witness to problems that need our attention: abuses of police power, wars of aggression, conditions in homeless encampments, consequences of climate change, the carnage of our gun culture and all the other crises of Planet Earth.

Mistrust of news media, especially in the digital era, is both a supply problem and a demand problem. On the supply side, in addition to a vast amount of more or less authoritative reporting and comment, are legions of self-styled influencers, charlatans, would-be autocrats, conspiracy theorists, propagandists and arsonist-hackers competing for our eyeballs. They often hide behind pseudonyms and depend on algorithms to amass and recycle the most provocative falsehoods. They are masters of disguise. Steven Brill, cofounder of NewsGuard, a company that tracks disinformation, said in an interview that legitimate local news sites are now outnumbered by impostors sponsored by political operatives or foreign propagandists. “The odds are more than 50%, if you’re reading what you think is a local news site, you’re reading a fake news site,” Brill told me. “It’s another especially insidious step at undermining trust in institutions — in this case, local news, which has long been regarded as the most trusted news medium.”

Bad information can have dire consequences: Witness the anti-vaccine hysteria that flourished with the Covid pandemic, or Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign that culminated in an attempted coup. As I began writing this in London, cities across Great Britain were experiencing Islamophobic riots ignited by false social media claims that an attacker who killed three young girls in a Southport dance class was an undocumented Muslim immigrant. (He was born in the UK and is not a Muslim.) Cumulatively, disinformation eats away at the adhesive that holds societies together. “Disinformation operations turn us on ourselves,” Barbara McQuade, a professor at University of Michigan Law School and Bloomberg Opinion contributor, writes in her book Attack From Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America. “As a result, we become outraged or fearful, then cynical, and finally numb and apathetic.”

Disinformation is bipartisan and moves at warp speed. Within hours of the July attempt to assassinate Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, the internet was abuzz with baseless reports, including, from the right, assertions that President Joe Biden had ordered the shooting of his rival and, from the left, that the near miss had been staged by the Trump campaign to generate sympathy for the candidate.

On the demand side, mistrust is a byproduct of credulousness, short attention spans, an inherent suspicion of authority, a shallow understanding of how professional newsrooms operate, and an all-too-human tendency to favor news that echoes our opinions or appeals to our emotions. These shortcomings have been with us forever, but they have intensified with the breakdown of old business models and metastasized in the entitled culture of social media, which invites journalists to salt their work with attitude or opinion, consumers to regard themselves as critics and publishers to measure success in clicks – as if editors have been replaced by Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes.

Needed: More Transparency, Accountability and News Literacy

To combat disinformation and shore up trust in the news, we have to address both suppliers and consumers.

One seemingly obvious way for news outlets to win back trust is to make their content more worthy of it. Major news outlets like my former employers at the New York Times now post the qualifications and experience of reporters alongside their bylines and take greater pains to explain how they know what they report. They invite reader feedback and respond to it. (The public editor post was discontinued in 2017, replaced by a cacophony of readers.)

The past two decades have also seen a healthy proliferation of systematic fact-checking. Newspapers and services like the Associated Press and Reuters now routinely attach fact-check sidebars to coverage of news, a form of accountability that feels more essential than ever in the Trump era. Nonprofit services like FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and MediaWise hunt down and expose viral falsehoods.

But fact-checking is not enough. As Peter Adams, senior vice president of the nonprofit News Literacy Project, points out, purveyors of untruths “can produce falsehoods much more quickly than fact-checkers can debunk them.” Fact-checking, especially on television, comes mostly after the fact and lacks the attention-grabbing appeal of lurid speculation. Confronted with facts, Adams notes, purveyors of false information simply double down: “‘Oh, the fact-checkers say this is false. … That’s how you know this is true! Share it widely!’”

“This has caused many fact-checkers to feel as though they are playing a game of hopeless Whac-A-Mole,” Adams told me in an email.

NewsGuard goes beyond checking facts to policing the media ecosystem. The venture employs a staff of trained journalists who rate the overall reliability of news sources and their affiliated social media accounts on a scale of zero to 100. Scores are based on how well purveyors of information practice the basics of honest journalism: acknowledging and correcting mistakes, clearly labeling opinions, disclosing their ownership and financing, revealing conflicts of interest, and so on. NewsGuard’s clients include not only news outlets and aggregators, but also advertisers who want to avoid tarnishing their brands by having their ads published alongside preposterous claims that Hillary Clinton is the mastermind of a global pedophile ring, or that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was faked by the government to promote gun control. Much of the advertising on the internet is posted by automated programs that seek maximum engagement without regard to veracity. Critics of the social media free-for-all argue that, with democracy at stake, the government should impose some accountability.

One prime target is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a provision originally designed to protect robust free speech on the internet. In effect, under Section 230, the giant digital platforms are treated not as publishers but as neutral pipelines, like the US Postal Service or telecom operators, not liable for damages caused by offensive content that moves on their networks. This immunity has been a priceless gift to those platforms. In 2023, Dominion Voting Systems settled a libel suit against Fox News for publishing false allegations that the company’s voting machines were programmed to change Trump votes into Biden votes. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million. The defamatory claims were also disseminated on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but these platforms were protected by Section 230.

Far from being hands-off middlemen, online platforms amplify and target content to maximize traffic and profit. I’m wary of measures that compromise free speech, but there’s a strong case for limiting the protected status of digital platforms, at least for paid content, including political ads, and for algorithms that flood our inboxes with provocative content. Essentially, this would entail holding platforms accountable when they behave like publishers.

Brill, for one, argues that a creative way to get around Section 230 is to treat the promises that digital platforms make in their fine print as binding contracts. What if the Federal Trade Commission or other consumer protection agencies actually enforced those ubiquitous terms-of-service commitments swearing to eschew content that incites violence, makes dangerous health claims or otherwise violates community standards? What if the Foreign Agents Registration Act obliged YouTubers to disclose funding by foreign intelligence services?

But proposals to repeal or tweak Section 230, or to circumvent it through regulatory agencies, face resistance from a richly funded tech industry lobby, right-wing accusations of anti-conservative wokeness and some genuine concerns about the First Amendment.

An alternative to regulation is to subsidize reputable news providers. This is not without precedent. Public broadcasting outlets like PBS and the BBC consistently top the list of most trusted news sources. A growing number of nonprofit news organizations depend on tax-deductible donations to support the costly labor of quality journalism. (I was the founding editor of one, the Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice.) The American Journalism Project, which bills itself as a “venture philanthropy,” invests in a portfolio of independent local nonprofit news outlets, a particularly endangered category of news organizations that serve as watchdogs over local government and create a sense of community. In 2023, AJP supported nearly 600 full-time journalists in local newsrooms. It’s a start.

Journalist Nicholas Lemann, former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, suggests a bargain in which news organizations accept a measure of regulation in exchange for the benefits of professional status: “The question is whether a clearer distinction between free speech and free press could be used not just to shore up journalism but to improve it, to make it more socially useful by raising its standards. This wouldn’t entail suppressing anyone’s speech … but it would entail creating a meaningful categorical distinction for journalists that would be the basis not just for legal privileges, but also for special policy and funding consideration.”

The flip side of improving the supply of trustworthy news is making ourselves more sophisticated consumers. In 2008, Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, launched the News Literacy Project, which debunks viral rumors under the rubric RumorGuard. But its main mission is to provide middle- and high-school teachers free online lesson plans to train students to be critical readers. (Full disclosure: I have donated to the News Literacy Project.)

In the 2023-24 school year, more than 19,000 educators from all over the country tapped into NLP’s virtual classroom and its professional development tools to share news literacy lessons with more than 475,000 students. Students learn how to distinguish news from advertisements and advocacy, how to collect and verify information using multiple sources, how to detect bias and keep their own opinions in check, and how to provide context. They explore the appeal of conspiracy theories and study the legal protections of the First Amendment. Miller rightly sees news literacy as “an essential life skill” and advocates for more states to include it in their required learning standards. NLP recently won an agreement to work with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, to ensure students are taught media literacy before completing high school.

“Groups like the News Literacy Project do a lot of really good work,” says Michelle Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. “But it’s not a national priority. It’s still bottoms-up.” Indeed, an advocacy group called Media Literacy Now compiles a global index of media literacy, using proxies such as press freedom, education levels and citizen participation to compute a rough measure of a country’s ability to withstand disinformation. The US ranks 15th out of 44 countries, lagging most of Europe. “You would think it’s a no-brainer,” Lipkin told me, “but there is a lot of competition for the education space and for resources. And there is some resistance from the right, claiming that [media literacy] is a kind of liberal ideal.”

Well, of course it is.

In a world where the news is delivered by TikTok videos, Instagram, Facebook and other echo chambers, where expertise is regarded with suspicion and where our news diet is increasingly force-fed by anonymous algorithms and artificial intelligence, any complacency about the state of our democracy, let alone our free press, would be foolish. Trust cannot be conjured out of wishful thinking, but it can be rebuilt, bit by bit. We won’t be returning to the days of Walter Cronkite, but the best news providers will earn trust by being more transparent and accountable, and I’m hopeful that the next generation of news consumers will be able to tell the difference.