In 1972, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, Gallup first polled Americans to gauge their trust in the media. 68 percent said they did. Four years later in 1976, that rose to 72 percent.
Gallup still asks that question of consumers, and trust in media is now at an all-time low of 31 percent, a slow burn that has been ongoing for decades.
So it’s fitting that it was inside Gallup’s Washington D.C. headquarters that a cavalcade of media executives and on-air talent held forth to try and figure not only why America’s trust in media has eroded, but what they can do to reverse that trend.
The Gallup building hosted Semafor’s Innovation to Restore Trust in News: A National Summit, with Semafor co-founders Ben Smith and Justin Smith and media editor Max Tani grilling guests about the sorry state of affairs.
It also doubled as a meeting of media reporters (The New York Times had a veritable delegation of journalists in the room), where it seemed that nearly every journalist that covers the beat was furiously taking notes during the talks, and commiserating about the sorry state of affairs at the cocktail party.
It also kicked off with something of a bang, as CNN CEO Mark Thompson opened his conversation with Tani by saying that no, he does not trust the media.
“I think where I differ from quite a few people, certainly in legacy media, is I think I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience, which is kind of deferential to media,” Thompson said. “I think we should use a box of Kleenex to dry our eyes about the loss of trust, and think about how we rebuild in some ways a more adult relationship. Instead of thinking of the audience as sheep who need to be trusting and believe everything we say, accept that they are challenging group of people that we need to raise our game to connect to.”
To that end, Thompson and others in attendance argued that the “age of deference,” as Gallup perhaps found in the 1970s, is likely not coming back, and that more uncertainty is likely in the near-term amid the “digital democratization and also disruption of deference in politics” continues to swirl.
Or, as NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde said, media is at an “inflection point,” and the industry needs to adapt accordingly.
Or as former Fox News host turned podcaster Megyn Kelly quipped: “[The media] did this to itself, it was a travesty, I watched it happen.”
“To some extent, its sad, because I am formerly of legacy media and I am sad that it has decided to go this way,” she added, though her criticism seemed to be focused on the biases of those that produce news. “I think the country would be better off if we had the old version of CNN, and the original version of MSNBC.”
So, what can the media do?
Maybe being more dispassionate is one part of the equation.
“Distance is always useful when you are a journalist or an editor,” says Wall Street Journal editor in chief Emma Tucker. “If people are switching away from the news, and they don’t trust it, then it is on us to win that trust back. We are very clear when we approach stories that we are observers, we are not participants.”
“What I think more people need to do, and that I have tried to do, is take the emotion out of it, take the emotion out of covering the news,” added Fox News anchor Bret Baier. “And I think over time, over the years, that has become a problem. Some people got emotional about it, and lost a big portion of their audience.”
Or perhaps more transparency is what the audience needs. In the 1970s, Walter Cronkite was the “voice of God,” but today perhaps being honest with your audience about your point of view, or how you are learning about what you are writing about, could help a news brand stand out. The audience, as Thompson noted, may prefer to be more engaged with the news.
“Having individual beat reporters speak to you directly as readers, viewers, explaining to them what they’re working on and how they’re working on it … getting to know the bylines,” New York Times editor Joe Kahn said. “Those are all part of trust.”
“We keep talking about how to ensure that we are trusted, it’s actually trust your audience, they are smart people,” adds NPR CEO Katherine Maher.
Or maybe news outlets can lean into one part of the media that has more effectively retained a level of trust from the audience: Local news.
“One thing that we can proactively do as a profession, is that we have to invest in local journalism,” Conde said. “The backbone of our business is our local TV stations. That is a huge competitive advantage for us.”
“We have 200 newsrooms across the country, nearly 3,000 local journalists, and every quarter we sit down with the heads of those newsrooms and we say, ‘What’s on the docket? What are the people in your community interested in?’ so that we’re really being much more responsive to that,” Maher said. “To me that is the absolute defining difference of NPR. What are the people in your community interested in.”
And then there’s the news. Just the facts reporting has its share of challenges, but even Kelly says that she relies on journalists in the field to provide the facts that can inform her monologues.
And there are early signals that we are in a boomtime for news.
“News is good for business,” Kahn said. “And Trump, as we know from this first month, is the most newsmaking person to occupy the Oval Office I’ve ever seen.”