Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?

“Everyone is constantly yelling about the mainstream media,” a friend wrote a few years ago for Columbia Journalism Review, “and rarely are we referring to the same thing.” The media isn’t a monolith, and the “trust” enjoyed decades ago by select news outlets wasn’t always won through reporting that afflicted the comfortable or comforted the afflicted. The four minds gathered at this Harper’s roundtable—the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, Semafor‘s media reporter, one of America’s most enduring press critics, and the very-online founder of User Mag—complicate their central question from all sides, challenging each other on the roots of the news media’s credibility crisis, the severity of press-freedom threats under the Trump Administration, and the risks and rewards of independent journalism today.

Jelani Cobb: The editor of the local newspaper, the reporter people are familiar with, the family physician who has taken care of you and your siblings—these figures have credibility in a way that large national institutions do not. Americans have never trusted large national institutions: in the nineteenth century, we didn’t trust the railroad monopolies; in the early twentieth century, we didn’t trust the newly corporatized banks. Today, when people think of a large, faceless, national institution, it’s more often than not the news media.

The crisis is that the collapse of the news business—brought on by the destruction of its three-legged stool of revenue from classified ads; retail advertising (captured by Google and Facebook); and subscriptions, the only leg still standing but one that has never covered journalism’s costs—has most severely damaged local outlets. Like the one hundred million Americans without a primary-care physician, we’ve lost the proximate, familiar institutions people actually trusted, leaving only the large, remote institutions that Americans have distrusted throughout our history.