Since the 2016 election, the journalism establishment has struggled with the existential question of its own trustworthiness.
In that year, amid criticism that coverage of the Presidential campaigns had been biased, the number of Americans who said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” dropped to an all-time low of 32 percent, according to Gallup. In late 2018, that figure was at 45 percent — still lower than during most of the 1990s and 2000s, and well off the all-time high, since Gallup started asking, of 72 percent in 1976.
In the last few years, a number of serious efforts have been launched to attack this problem. “Trusting News,” an initiative of the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute, has worked with 53 news organizations “to demystify trust in news and empower journalists to take responsibility for actively demonstrating credibility and earning trust.” The Trust Project, formed by a consortium of a dozen news organizations around the world like The Economist and The Washington Post, is working on “transparency standards that help [citizens] easily assess the quality and credibility of journalism.” The Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy recently released a 180-page report, “Crisis in Democracy.”
