Is Americans’ declining trust in media driven by political messaging?

Nieman Lab reports on a Harvard dissertation that examines Americans' declining trust in media. The finding: it may owe more to fifty years of political messaging than to journalism's actual quality. David Beavers, a former Politico editor now heading to Wake Forest as an assistant professor, studied congressional rhetoric about the press from nineteen thirty-nine to twenty twenty-three. He discovered that elite attacks on media — starting with southern Democrats defending segregation in the nineteen sixties and seventies, then accelerating with Republican strategists like Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich in the early nineteen nineties — preceded and drove the decline in public trust. Beavers found that American journalism is uniquely vulnerable to such attacks because it lacks the professional gatekeeping — licensing, degree requirements, membership standards — that protect law and medicine. As a result, criticism of the press, once distributed across the political spectrum, has become decidedly conservative.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton