Christopher’s view
Here’s the good news, and the bad news, for journalists troubled by the decline in trust in your profession: “Trust in media” is a relatively new phenomenon, dating to the rise of survey data in the 1930s. The media’s devotion to the idea of the “public interest” and its associated impartiality also roughly dates to the mid-20th Century. Trust in the media has been declining for decades.
Meanwhile, taking the longer view of our collective past shows us that the current landscape of a partisan and deeply divided American media – coarsening and polarizing politics, spreading unreliable information and propaganda — is in many ways just a return to business as usual.
For most of U.S. history journalists and the press were overtly, often sensationally partisan. Citizens expected as much. So did politicians. Historians of journalism have well documented that readers supported and trusted “their” media — Republican or Whig or Know Nothing or Jacksonian or Populist or Socialist publications — and turned a blind eye to much of the rest. To put it differently, “echo chambers” once existed in the world of print as much as they do today in the world of social media.
Likewise, America’s first presidential campaign season already showed its fair share of political mudslinging. In fact, journalists’ bad behavior is still notorious in that hotly contested election of 1800, Adams vs. Jefferson, when the partisan press spewed controversial, spiteful and alarmist allegations designed to tear down the opposing candidate and party as much if not more so than to build up their own. Pro-Adams Federalist organs before (and especially after) the election circulated (since-confirmed) rumors about Jefferson’s sexual relationship(s) with his slaves, and in 1800 they framed the electorate’s choice as a battle between “God—and a religious President” or “Jefferson—and no God!!!” Pro-Jeffersonian warned another Adams presidency would continue “a reign of terror created by false alarms, to promote domestic feud and foreign war.”
Endorsements — much discussed this fall — weren’t created to objectively weigh the pros and cons of candidates. The press essentially political. Business journalism offered some incentive for facts, but in the sorts of judgements we remember best — say abolitionist newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison’s famous — the press for much of U.S. history was usually endorsing and picking sides. Readers expected that. From before the birth of the Republic through the muck-raking days of Upton Sinclair around the turn of the 20th century, the press as a whole was less concerned with balanced reporting and impartially informing “the American people” than with reflecting and reinforcing the biased beliefs of narrow segments of the public.
Objectivity and neutrality, by and large, were products of the media consolidation that followed World War II, and a limited range of media options that spanned a few giant radio and television companies along with high-circulation magazines like and. That period and those media conduits were what generated the major expectations Americans (and many around the world) came to associate with what Ben Smith described last week as a self-conscious, high-minded “public interest.”
History suggests that there’s no natural pull back to that era of a more “objective” media, and no clear path to escape, once again, the inherently unreliable partisan journalism of America’s early history. George Washington warned in his 1796 Farewell Address, I have argued, that passions swayed by foreign influence, emerging new political parties, and rising factionalism were the major threats to American democracy. When we look at our political landscape today, with foreign adversaries making mischief on social media, growing polarization, and a new class of powerful individuals and groups, it’s hard not to hear Washington’s words as a warning for our own times.