One of the biggest concerns in the news business over the last several years has been about the “loss of trust.”
The industry was aghast when a Gallup poll last year found that “Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.” That’s down sharply from five years ago.
The message you hear from the leaders of major news organization is: “We’ve lost the trust of the people, and we need to earn it back.”
In an interview with Semafor last year, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn lamented the loss of trust in news, and said “it’s going to take some time to see if we can actually rebuild that trust in journalism.”
CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, newly installed by the network’s anti-woke leadership, introduced himself last week by acknowledging that “people don’t trust us like they used to” and vowing to earn their trust back — in his case, by putting less weight on what academics and elites say.
Jeff Bezos, the owners of the Washington Post, uses trust like a cudgel. In his marching orders to the newsroom in 2024 – headlined “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media” – he wrote that the paper “will have to exercise new muscles,” to earn trust. He cited his own decision to kill an editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris – an act that led 200,000 readers to cancel their subscriptions – as a “meaningful step” moving the paper “up the trust scale.”
Trust is important. And while a lot of the decrease in trust I think is the result of Trump’s attacks on the press and organizations like Fox News trafficking in lies, I can see why people are also losing trust in the traditional elite media.
And I think a lot of it is because the leaders of those newsrooms – in the name of what they call “objectivity” – have too often engaged in false equivalences that obscure, rather than expose, the truth.
In fact, I think nothing makes people lose trust in news organizations as much as when they’ve seen something with their own eyes — and then see news coverage that doesn’t comport with what they themselves experienced.
Case in point: Legacy media coverage of the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent earlier this week.
Millions of people watched the video that clearly shows that Good, a 37-year-old mother of three driving an SUV, was not the aggressor.
And yet – because the constantly lying Trump administration is insisting against all evidence that she was — the coverage treats that like a debatable point.
Why would you trust a news organization that doesn’t have the integrity and the guts to state an obvious truth?
Trump wrote on Truth Social that the driver “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” and “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
That was palpably untrue.
Kristi Noem instantly declared Good a “domestic terrorist” who “attempted to ram” ICE agents.
That was untrue and vile.
Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the shooting was the “result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.”
That was untrue, addled, and pernicious.
But to our major newsrooms, the truth of the matter is a jump ball.
Wednesday’s live coverage on the Washington Post website was headlined “Officials dispute Noem’s claims after woman fatally shot by ICE in Minneapolis.”
The New York Times coverage on Wednesday evening was headlined “Minnesota Officials Dispute Federal Accounts of Fatal ICE shooting.”
Another Times story was headlined “Video of ICE Shooting Becomes a Political Rorschach Test.”
The Times’s most recent article, as of this writing, is about how “[d]isputes between Minnesota officials and the Trump administration intensified Thursday.” It doesn’t say who is right. It says “Officials have described the killing of Ms. Good in starkly different terms.”
As it happens, the Times’s crack video investigative team published a must-see analysis on Thursday under the headline “Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis.” The footage, they concluded, “appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired three shots at close range.”
That was terrific reporting.
But the Times’s political journalists treated their own newsroom’s analysis as just another party heard from, writing:
Administration officials, including President Trump, defended the shooting as lawful, saying that the agent who fired was acting in self-defense. City and state officials described those accounts as “propaganda” and “garbage.”
A video analysis shows that the woman’s vehicle appeared to be turning away from the officer as he opened fire.
(The Washington Post also did a frame-by-frame analysis, lamely concluding that it “raises questions” about the accounts from Trump and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.)
The Associated Press this afternoon is still apparently flummoxed, reporting that Noem and Trump have “cast Good as a villain, suggesting she used her vehicle as a weapon to attack the officer who shot her,” while “state and local officials and protesters rejected that characterization.”
To be clear, what the headlines should have said – and should be saying – is that the video shows Trump and others are lying.
How can you possibly trust a news organization that falsely equates obvious, epic gaslighting with the saw-it-with-your-own-eyes truth?
You can’t and you shouldn’t.