My last post questioned the claim that trust in the media dropped substantially during the Trump years. The idea behind that claim is that trust will rise or fall depending on the performance of the media: if they show bias, as some observers think they did with Trump, people will realize that and turn against them. Many people treat this as just a matter of common sense. But a recent essay by Louis Menand* suggests a different possibility. He observes that during the 1950s, the press had a cooperative relationship with government officials: where the "national interest" was involved, journalists largely accepted the official accounts, and didn't report information that they thought would be harmful. This was particularly relevant to foreign affairs, but I think you can also see it in some domestic coverage--e. g., problems in the rollout of the polio vaccine. On the other side, politicians and government officials were restrained in criticizing the media--they might object to particular stories, but they didn't make general attacks. In the 1960s, the media started to get more aggressive and critical in its reporting, and government officials started pushing back--as a result, public trust in both sides declined. That is, better news coverage (as judged by today's standards) led to less trust.
This connects to a point I noticed when doing my last post: the nations with the highest trust in the media, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, are not the most democratic. According to their latest report, the top four countries for trust in the media are China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Kenya. I don't have much faith in any opinion data from China, but the pattern is still clear without it. The specific question they use is whether you trust the institution to "do what is right." For many people, I think this means being "responsible"--emphasizing the positive, and downplaying or even suppressing information that might cause harm. The other question I discussed in that post, whether you can "trust most news most of the time," doesn't seem to show the same negative correlation with democratic government--I think that's because in context people interpret "trust" as meaning that the news is accurate. However, it doesn't seem to show a positive correlation either.
Returning to the United States, I haven't been able to find any questions on general trust in the media until 1969, when Gallup asked "In presenting the news dealing with political and social issues, do you think that **** deal fairly with all sides or do they tend to favor one side?" The question wasn't asked again until the mid-1980s, but since then it's been asked pretty often by several different survey organizations. Originally they asked separate questions about newspapers and TV news--later surveys generally had one question about "news organizations." The results, with higher values meaning more support for the "dealing fairly" option:
There is a clear downward trend. However, it seems to have bottomed out in the early 2010s--that is, during the Trump years, people were more likely to say that news organizations dealt fairly with all sides than they had been during the Obama years. The last time the question was asked was February 2020--a lot has happened since then, so it would be interesting to see what the results would be today. However, the general point is that trust in the media didn't show a particular decline while Trump was president, and more generally doesn't seem to have many ups and downs--the rise in the late 2010s was the first clear departure from the trend.
That is, whatever you think about the quality of media coverage of Trump, there's no sign that it led people to lost confidence in the media. Or to put it another way, good journalism should be valued for its own sake, not because it will be greeted with public approval.
*And previously Michael Schudson's Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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