The billionaires who own the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have both recently cited the “loss of trust” as a cudgel with which to attack their own news organizations.
They argue that the papers have lost the trust of readers because of left-wing political bias. And they say the way to earn back trust is to be more “balanced.”
The first indication that this argument is manifestly specious is that the two of them trotted it out as a lame, post-facto excuse for their hugely controversial decisions to kill Kamala Harris endorsements that had already been prepared by their editorial boards. In each case, they took action for an obvious and ignoble reason – to kiss up to Donald Trump – not as some sort of act of journalistic courage.
So they’re basically full of bull.
But the argument still deserves to be rebutted on its merits, in part because they’re not the only ones making it.
The Argument
In an essay in his newspaper headlined “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” Washington Post owner and walking conflict of interest Jeff Bezos argued that “Most people believe the media is biased.”
The industry’s “long and continuing fall in credibility” is therefore its own fault, he wrote.
“Declining to endorse presidential candidates” – which is the way he pitched his act of obeisance to Trump – “is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction,” he wrote.
And more is apparently to come. “I have a bunch of ideas, and I am working on that right now,” Bezos said at the recent New York Times’s Dealbook summit. “We saved The Washington Post once,” he said, referring to his purchase of the Post in 2013, back when it was in a financial death spiral. “This will be the second time. It needs to be put back on a good footing again.”
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biomedical mogul who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018, is even more into this argument than Bezos.
In Soon-Shiong’s case, killing his editorial board’s Harris endorsement was only the first of several MAGA-friendly acts.
Soon-Shiong even for a short while said he planned to put a “bias meter” atop news articles, with a “button” that would provide AI-generated both-sides versions. (He still plans to do so for opinion content.)
In an interview with LA Times reporter James Rainey, Soon-Shiong “depicted himself as an unflinching protector of journalistic balance,” Rainey wrote.
“We need to be that middle-of-the-road, trustworthy source,” Soon-Shiong told Rainey, suggesting it would boost circulation. “The only way you can survive is not be an echo chamber of one side.”
The Trust Crisis is Overblown
The two billionaires have it all wrong – about trust, and about how journalism works.
First of all, the lack of trust in news organizations is neither as bad as they say, nor a function of newsroom bias.
Bezos and others love to cite a recent Gallup Poll which found that 69 percent of Americans have little to no trust in the “mass media” to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” That ranked the media, as an institution, even lower than Congress, which is pretty bad.
But a Pew Research Center survey in October indicated that Gallup’s numbers were exaggerated. Pew found that 59 percent of Americans have either a little or a lot of trust in the information presented by national news organizations.
That was down from 76 percent in 2016, but the decline was largely fueled by a precipitous dive among Republicans, whose trust level dropped from 70 percent to 40 percent.
What that means is that the “loss of trust” is almost entirely a function of MAGA Republicans turning against reality-based news organizations — hardly a surprise given that news organizations tend to publish facts that don’t align with MAGA lies, and that Trump has been constantly attacking the mainstream media as “fake news” all this time.
In other words, the “trust” problem cited by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has nothing to do with “bias” and is really another problem entirely – that the Trump universe is averse to facts.
The only way to win over those readers is either to print lies – their solution – or mine: work harder to persuade them of the truth.
If They Really Cared About Trust
Finally, as media scholars like NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen have been pointing out for years, trust doesn’t mean “we don’t know where you’re coming from” – it means “we know where you’re coming from and we trust you.”
You don’t earn trust with “balance” – especially not between two imbalanced things – you earn it by consistently providing evidence to support your findings.
That’s why the central premise of the groups that are sincere about building trust in journalism – groups like Trusting News — is that news organizations need to embrace transparency and engagement, not lobotomized both-sidesism.
Transparency involves better explaining the process by which journalists try so hard to determine and verify the facts they report.
And the most exciting, still developing forms of engagement journalism involve such things as “solutions journalism,” which uses evidence to explain what’s working and what’s not working to help find solutions; “solidarity journalism”, which argues that journalists must “stand for basic human dignity and against suffering”; and “movement journalism”, which encourage “collaboration between journalists and grassroots movements.”
If there is a trust problem it’s that young people and others increasingly trust online content creators as much or more than journalists. But there’s an explanation for that as well that has nothing to do with “bias.”
A thoughtful Shorenstein Center report by Julia Angwin recently examined that problem and concluded that creators – unlike journalists — “narrate their expertise, respond to reader questions or suggestions, and interact with their critics — all tactics that help build trust.” Mainstream journalists are typically not allowed by their owners to do any of those things.
The billionaires would take to an extreme an idea that already has way too much currency among our top newsroom leaders: that you lose trust if you appear partisan in any way.
But when the world is so polarized that the truth appears partisan to some, avoiding the appearance of partisanship means avoiding the truth. That ought to be a non-starter.