Journalists know they’re losing the public’s respect and attention. Yet rather than try to win back the audience, they’re racing to a conclusion in which the last news anchor and the last viewer have a final chat before turning out the lights. Consider the CBS news show “60 Minutes,” which edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to replace her word salad with something coherent.
“Well Bill,” Harris responded to a question by host Bill Whitaker about whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heeds the Biden administration. “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
At least, that’s what Harris answered in a teaser aired before the full interview. In the broadcast, the response to the question was a more comprehensible, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
“60 Minutes” claims the answer aired during the show came from “a different portion of the response.” That may be true. It’s an easy issue to resolve by releasing the full transcript or video. A full 85 per cent of respondents to a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll say that “CBS should release the full transcript of Harris’ ’60 Minutes’ interview.” Fifty-three percent say CBS tried to make her look better.
Given public sentiment on the issue, releasing the full transcript is the smart move. It’s also, as former CBS reporter Catherine Herridge pointed out, what they did when she interviewed Donald Trump in 2020. “It’s about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit,” said Herridge.
It was inevitable that publishing two different answers to the same question would go over badly in a politically polarized era when news organizations are seen as partisan players.
“It’s understandable that so many people are angry, particularly on the heels of a national conversation about whether the media was complicit in covering up the physical limitations of President Joe Biden,” noted Jennifer Graham of the Deseret News.
Of course, the problems go deeper than that. Once-prominent media outlets have been eroding their standing with the public for years. Much of that damage has been done as the country divides into mutually hostile political camps and news organizations pick sides.
After special counsel Robert Mueller III closed the investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and then-president Trump with a report finding little substance to the charges, former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth scrutinized the related media frenzy for the Columbia Journalism Review.
“Outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press,” Gerth wrote at the beginning of his detailed 2023 analysis. He added that, as he investigated the media craze over Russiagate, “not a single major news organization made available a newsroom leader to talk about their coverage.”
The analysis wasn’t kind to Trump and his supporters, either. But, as Gerth emphasized, the low esteem in which politicians are held is a separate concern from the contempt with which many Americans view the media, which is supposed to keep the public informed.
“Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media,” Gallup reported earlier this month. “For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36 per cent) than trust it a great deal or fair amount.” Just 31 per cent expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence.
Much of the brand-name news media leans left. Allsides, a media literacy company, publishes a media-bias chart, which has the New York Times, the Washington Post, the three major broadcast networks (ABC, NBC and CBS news), along with CNN and MSNBC on the left. The Wall Street Journal is in the centre with Reuters and Reason magazine. Fox News is on the right, along with operations that mostly tout themselves as overtly conservative.
So it’s no surprise that media lost the most ground with Republicans, from 68 per cent expressing a great deal or fair amount of trust in the early 1970s, to 12 per cent now. Independents followed a similar path, dropping from 74 per cent in 1976, to 27 per cent today. But even trust among Democrats dropped 22 points in just six years — from 76 per cent in 2018, to 54 per cent in 2024.
Audiences have shrunk. Newspaper weekday circulation fell two-thirds from a peak of 63.3 million in 1984. Network evening news viewership is about half what it was in 1980. Cable news followed a similar trend, though the big three networks — Fox News in particular — regained some ground this election year.
Independent and online operations pick up some of the slack, and many of them do a very good job. They mostly serve partisan silos or niche interests, and perhaps those fractured audiences are fitting for a country that is so divided.
We’re fortunate that talented Substackers, podcasters and talking heads on Rumble and X — the likes of the Free Press, Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald — step in where media dinosaurs seem content to beclown themselves with down-the-rabbit-hole investigations and questionable interviews in front of the dwindling ranks of those interested in what they have to offer.
The future may well belong to a mass of relatively small media operations, many openly opinionated. They can do well — so long as they avoid the mistakes of their predecessors.
“During this time, when the media is under extraordinary attack and widely distrusted, a transparent, unbiased and accountable media is more needed than ever,” Gerth wrote in his Russiagate analysis.
“Unbiased” is a big ask with little precedent. The period of “objective” journalism was a brief diversion from a history of partisan American news operations that has now resumed. So long as journalists are open about their biases, they’ll find audiences, as their predecessors did decades ago. That is, they will grow audiences and build trust if they remember to be transparent and accountable in their reporting.
Transparent and accountable. That’s what happens when you show your notes to explain why your work looks like a PR operation for a political candidate, or when you answer questions about your journalistic failures. The media of the future will be shaped by how “60 Minutes” and other outlets misbehave now.
National Post