When reality is seen as biased, objectivity alone won’t shield the press. By Philip Bump

When reality is seen as biased, objectivity alone won’t shield the press

The media has a trust problem that overlaps with its economic problems. But that trust problem is often a function of external actions, not internal ones.

by Philip Bump

October 30, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

“The press doesn’t occupy the same place in American society it once did,” a presidential candidate said during a campaign stop at Ohio State University. “And the reason is that many newspapers have failed to meet the demands of responsible reporting.”

He continued: “People used to say they knew it was so because they read it in the newspaper, but you don’t hear that said anymore.”

You would be forgiven for assuming that the candidate who offered those words was Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. But it wasn’t. It was Alabama Gov. George Wallace, speaking 60 years ago as he attempted to wrench the 1964 nomination away from President Lyndon Johnson by exacerbating the widening gulf between Southern, pro-segregation Democrats like him and those in the North. (He failed.)

The point is not to compare Trump to Wallace or to overlay Wallace’s racist politics onto Trump. It is, instead, to point out that even 60 years ago, reactionary politicians promoted the idea that the media was irresponsible in its coverage to the detriment of their political views.

On Monday, Jeff Bezos, the owner of this particular newspaper, wrote an essay explaining why the paper’s editorial side wouldn’t endorse a candidate for president. He noted, correctly, that such an endorsement probably wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. But he framed the decision as centered in the need to rebuild confidence in The Post as an institution. The essay was titled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” Bezos wrote of the media. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help,” he continued. “Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.” That includes presidential endorsements, which “create a perception of bias.”

Let’s set aside all of the other considerations raised by the essay and the controversy that obviously prompted it. Let’s simply drill down on these overlapping points: that the media is suffering from a lack of trust and that among the steps we can take to increase our credibility is to withhold such endorsements.

Bezos unquestionably knows more about the business side of The Post than I do, and I would never assume that I know as much or more about the industry than he does. But, as someone with a particular familiarity with the overlap of the media and politics, this defense of the decision not to endorse as a vehicle for increasing trust seems obviously and deeply flawed.

It's obviously true that trust in the media has declined over time. Polling from Gallup shows that while two-thirds of Americans said they had a great deal of trust or a fair amount of trust in the press in 1968, only 31 percent say that now.

But while this decline in confidence has occurred on both the left and the right, the drop has been steadier and sharper among Republicans. Most Democrats still express confidence in the mass media, though that is also down after a surge in 2017. There was an equal-and-opposite drop among Republicans the year prior.

You know why. Democrats embraced the mass media — which most people would probably understand as the traditional media — in 2017 because it seemed like a vehicle for holding the newly inaugurated president to account. There were a flurry of stories both about Trump’s actions as president and about the ongoing investigation into the election that awarded him that title. Parallels were drawn to the investigations that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 — a period in which confidence in the media sagged among Republicans and rose among Democrats. Even after the Trump-era bubble collapsed, trust in the media among Democrats landed about where it was a decade ago.

That coverage and those stories didn’t lead to Trump’s resignation or removal from office. That was in part because he had been so effective in stoking skepticism about the press as he sought the Republican nomination the year prior. Trump deployed the term “fake news” with abandon, something he admitted that he did to discredit the sort of coverage described above. “Fake news” entered the lexicon, with no cable-news channel deploying it more frequently than Fox News and no show using it more often than the one hosted by Trump’s friend Sean Hannity. Hannity averaged 3.2 million viewers each night of 2017.

The advent of candidate Trump presented Fox with both opportunity and risk. The opportunity was that, by aligning with the increasingly popular candidate, it could consolidate some of the fringe-right audience that had drifted to more-extreme sources of information, such as Breitbart and Infowars. The risk was that the channel’s audience might be more loyal to Trump than to Fox, which made the post-election period in 2020 particularly fraught.

It’s the fragmentation that is important here. There is a story to tell about the changes in the industry from Wallace’s speech in 1964 until, say, 2010, but it’s more important to consider the era of the internet and social media in particular. Fox News wasn’t the only outlet to see its base erode as the barriers to competing with larger outlets vanished — and as it became clear that the only reason to tell audiences the truth rather than what they wanted to hear was where outlets drew the line between self-respect and income.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post published a poll conducted in coordination with the Schar School that, among other things, evaluated where swing-state voters get their news and how much trust they granted the news media. Most Americans viewed the media with more distrust than trust — but the extent of distrust was much wider among those who identified Fox News or nontraditional news sources as primary venues for their information.

People like information sources that present the world the way they are predisposed to view it. This is why the mainstream media gained trust on the left in the Trump era; Democrats saw Trump as dangerous and controversial, and news coverage often validated those concerns. For many on the right, it’s Steve Bannon and Elon Musk and Sean Hannity who are presenting a vision of the world as they want to see it — including that the traditional media offers a misleading, left-wing view of the world, not an objective one.

Back to The Post’s owner. Bezos’s argument is not that this divide and the erosion of trust is a function of newspaper endorsements, just that withholding endorsements is a way in which trust might be rebuilt, for people to believe that what we’re saying is accurate.

But the reason people don’t believe our coverage of the investigation into Russian election interference was accurate or accept our debunkings of Trump’s false claims about election fraud isn’t because they erroneously conflate our editorial board’s decisions with our coverage. It’s because there is a large, powerful, immediate universe of voices heavily invested in telling Trump supporters that the way they see the world is correct: that Trump is a victim and that the media and the elites are out to get him.

I get emails constantly from people challenging The Post’s reporting, particularly on Trump, usually by claiming that I or we are ignoring some piece of information because of our bias. When I occasionally respond, say by pointing to a story showing that their premise is incorrect, the goal posts are invariably moved elsewhere. An inconsequential correction is presented to suggest that we are consistently wrong. Some other tidbit is lifted from the social-media-nonsense universe. These exchanges aren’t rooted in bad faith, really, but in the writer’s misplaced faith in the accuracy of the news outlets they choose to believe.

This is what Bezos rejected as a victim mentality, sure, blaming the outside world for our travails. I’ve also admitted before that I have no useful answer to rebuilding trust broadly, much less in bolstering The Post’s subscriber base specifically. Those stipulations aside, I also recognize that the issue isn’t that many Americans see The Post as biased when its opinions are presented. The issue is that many Americans, particularly on the right, see The Post as biased when it presents facts. The effort to promote that perception dates back long enough to include Wallace, but the internet and social media made it much easier for it to propagate.

We must be believed to be accurate, Bezos wrote, which is true. But this is a moment in which tens of millions of Americans won’t believe that anything is true unless one man says it is. It’s a moment in which belief takes primacy to the extent that the misplaced conviction that the 2020 election results were suspect lead a coterie of senators to argue that the election should be overturned. Belief often precedes fact in 2024 rather than following it.

To make his point about the importance of belief, Bezos points to voting machines, devices that need to both tally the vote and present results that people accept. A central problem in 2020, of course, was that false claims about the inaccuracy of voting machines spread widely, bolstered by a falsehood-riddled news universe hoping to appeal to Trump’s base of support. That belief persists. The machines were the victims, sure, but what else could they have done?

Incidentally, the tendency to expect news sources to comport with the audience’s expectations is also why the decision not to offer an endorsement in the presidential contest resulted in such robust criticism from subscribers. The decision was seen — very understandably — as being in conflict to our reporting about the threat Trump poses to American institutions. It was seen as being in obvious conflict with the motto that sits on every page of The Post’s website. Many people who expect The Post to serve as a bulwark against what Trump advocates — however unfair that expectation often is — see the endorsement decision as a subversion of why they gave The Post money. So they stopped.

Maybe over the long term the decision will make it easier for those who are currently skeptical of the paper to buy a subscription. But the tension isn’t between subscribing and not subscribing. It’s between subscribing to The Post and getting information from some cheap or free news source that tells people exactly what they want to hear. Including, at times, that traditional media outlets that attempt to present an objective view of the world are dangerous and disingenuous.

Again, I don’t have an answer. And, again, I don’t think anything I wrote above will be new to Jeff Bezos. But if you’re on the ground getting kicked in the head by a mugger, it’s fair to identify yourself as not being entirely at fault. It is also fair to think that deciding not to carry a wallet won’t solve all of your problems in the future.