Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News

The Surprising Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News

The press really did change in the 1960s—for the better.

By JACK SHAFER

My prayers for a new way to think about the so-called crisis over “trust” in the press have been answered thanks to media scholar Matthew Pressman’s erudite new history, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News. Journalism has changed measurably since the 1960s, he writes, and those changes have altered how we regard the news and why opinion surveys show that fewer and fewer people seem to trust it.

Back in 1960—not quite a lifetime ago—page one of the New York Times was dominated by government news. Pressman picks out a date at random, April 21, 1960, and reports that all 14 stories on page one were about governmental bodies or officials. Inside, he continues, the paper’s opening pages contained transcripts of official statements and speeches, often by government officials, and almost every article in the main news category began with an account of what various leaders had said or done. Although analysis could be found as you plowed deeper in the Times, most articles “confined themselves to verifiable facts and a modicum of background information,” he writes. Official statements were automatically considered newsworthy. The press generally limited themselves to reporting allegations of wrongdoing against public officials only when charges were filed.

Then, even more than today, the Times set the national news agenda, and its stylistic choice to bow and defer to power was widely imitated. “Reporters did not challenge the people they covered or judge their motivations, beliefs, and competence,” Pressman writes. But two decades later—April 17, 1980, to be exact—the Times had changed. Coverage of government was still the main entrée, but reporters routinely challenged public officials in the absence of some allegation of wrongdoing against them. Transcripts had vanished, too, as reporting the news stopped being so much about the communication of events to readers and more about their interpretation.

This new set of news values, made necessary perhaps by the rise of TV, which assumed the newspapers’ duty to handle breaking news, and by a change in readership, which was now more highly educated, encouraged journalists to not just report the news but also to analyze it and challenge the elites in power.

Not every newspaper made this shift from being descriptors of the news to its interpreters precisely between 1960 and 1980, but nearly all have now. Other scholars have noted this shift before, but Pressman’s framing helps explain, in my mind at least, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against what he calls the “fake news” and why measurements of trust in the news profession decline almost every time Gallup fires up a new poll.

Liberated from their duty to merely transcribe events, journalists working on newspapers, magazines, and even TV began to address with real push-back in the 1960s such topics as the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. Journalism-prize lust played a role in journalism’s evolution from the plain to the ornate, too, as editors chased “social disorder stories” and “moral disorder stories” (phrases coined by sociologist Herbert Gans) that drew attention from the givers of Pulitzers, Polks, Peabodys, and all the other trophies. Journalism, once the servant of established power, became over those two key decades its opponent and judge. It was this turn that Vice President Spiro Agnew diagnosed during his brief moment in the Washington limelight. The press, Agnew carped, lent too much attention to dissenters, elevated into public prominence people like Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, and afforded too little respect to established power.

Agnew’s views had quiet support inside journalism. The top editor at the New York Times, A.M. Rosenthal, hit Agnewesque notes in a 1969 internal memo from which Pressman quotes:

I get the impression, reading the Times, that the image we give of America is largely of demonstrations, discrimination, antiwar movements, rallies, protests, etc. Obviously all these things are an important part of the American scene. But I think that because of our own liberal interest and because of our reporters’ inclination, we overdo this.

Pressman exits the freeway a couple of stops before reaching the conclusion that I think his historical evidence points to: That is, the evolution of the press into an adversarial—sometimes activist—institution may have played a role in the declining trust in news media reflected in polls. It’s not just the perceived liberal slant in journalism that puts some readers off. The subject matter of the beats the press now swarms that they once ignored—race, sex, class, inequality, for example—distresses some readers. They blame the messenger for their anxiety by telling pollsters they no long trust the press. It also stands to reason that the press corps’ steady defiance of authority has produced disquiet in some corners. And as political science professor Jonathan Ladd has noted, the proliferation and splintering media into its various ideological flavors have made criticism of the press a staple of the national conversation.

Most public opinion polls consistently show Republicans expressing lower trust in the press than shown by independents or Democrats. It would make for a nifty bit of social science research to get to the bottom of what Republicans so distrust. Surely the interpretative stance taken in many articles by liberal outlets like the New York Times rankle Republicans. But chances are they don’t even have to read the Times to be incensed by it. Add to that the subject matter and routine rejection of authority, and if you’re a Republican, what’s not to hate?

If I’m right, then the likelihood that the abiding trust the masses once had for the media will be restored in the coming decades is nil. The media has changed drastically since the days when it was almost universally trusted, and there’s basically no chance it will revert to its stenographic and pliant ways. The way I see it, distrust in the media is as much a feature as it is a bug.