If you’ve noticed that this blog has been quiet this month, you’re right.
The reason is that I spent much of October working on the 15th Dr. Lewis B. O’Donnell Media Summit. Working alongside an insanely talented student board, we hosted a day-long summit that included a panel discussion on the topic of trust in the media.
Trust is at the heart of several stories from the past few weeks in online journalism and sports media.
There was the Houston Astros’ debacle. From a media perspective, the biggest part of that story was the Astros’ now-retracted initial statement, which purposely obfuscated the issue and cast doubt on Stephanie Apstein’s reporting for Sports Illustrated. The Astros’ statement called on fans to believe them over the media. You can read any number of Twitter threads and comment sections to see that, on some level, that worked. There were people willing to trust the team over the media.
This is not built on anything the Astros have done, but instead is built on the foundation of general mistrust in the media. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is the result of decades of growing distrust in the media on all sides of American life. One thing that digital and social media have given rise to, anecdotally at least, is a seeming rise in both confirmation bias and social-identity theory. We seek out the information that supports our world view and dismiss that which doesn’t. If I am an Astros loyalist, I am going to trust the team I love more than a media member who, in my eyes, is trying to bring my team down. Because by tearing my team down, they’re tearing me down.
When I wrote above that the topic of the day was a lack of trust in media, what did you think of?
I bet there’s a good chance you thought about modern Republicans. About Trump and Fake News and the Liberal Media and all that. Right?
But the story out of Harvard last week — where student groups are boycotting the student newspaper because reporters called ICE for comment on a news story following an on-campus protest — shows this isn’t just a conservative thing.
It should go without saying, but let’s say it anyway: The reporters for the Crimson did absolutely nothing wrong. They followed proper journalistic procedure. They sought comment from relevant parties, which is the job. They also did it AFTER the protest, which is an ethical journalistic move because it minimizes harm to participants (a fact that probably should have been clearer in the original story).
But again, trust. The groups involved don’t trust ICE, and with good reason. But that distrust extends to the media. On the left, there is a belief that mainstream media are corrupted by the desire for access, by financial concerns, by a historically too-cozy relationship to those in power. Some of the critiques are fair, some aren’t. But they are real.
And the answer is not to throw up our hands. The answer is not to lecture those on either side of the partisan divide about what our job is.
It’s a lot more complicated than that.
Lack of trust may not be a new issue. But the economic and distribution changes that have transformed media in the digital and social age have made it more acute. Because teams, social groups, organizations, politicians — they don’t need us anymore. They don’t need the press to get their message out. They can connect directly with their audiences without having to go through a media gatekeeper. So if they don’t trust the media, it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t need us.
At the Media Summit at Oswego last week, the panelists discussed this issue. They agreed that this was not an issue that one person, one news organization, even one one generation can fix. It’s going to take all journalists, all media, doing better.
How do we transform trust in media? It’s not a problem that’s going to be solved. In the media, we tend to think of it like Claire thinks of the raptors in Jurassic World, as something we can control. But in this digital age, maybe we need to think of trust like Owen views the raptors: It’s a relationship. If we think of our readers as less of an audience and more of a community, maybe we can start rebuilding some trust. Slowly.