Your personal newsroom

Yet another survey details how much work journalists have to do to rebuild trust with the public.

The survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago in collaboration with the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media, found that 45 percent of respondents believed that “Most journalists try to manipulate the news for political or commercial purposes.” In contrast, 37 percent believed that “Most journalists try to report the news as accurately as possible.”

Unsurprisingly, there was a wide partisan divide: 77 percent of Republicans believed journalists were manipulative, 11 percent thought they were trying to be accurate. Among Democrats, those sentiments flipped: 24 percent took a dim view of journalists, while 61 percent were more positive. Independents were, on balance, negative toward journalists, 38 percent to 26 percent.

On the question about trust in media, local outlets fared best, with 64 percent of respondents having some, quite a bit, or a great deal of trust in those sources. And for all the talk of social media influence, only 26 percent of respondents had trust in those platforms. Artificial intelligence chatbots did worse: 23 percent.

“The gap between audiences’ view of journalists’ motivation and what all of us believe are actually our motivations is striking,” said Eric Schurenberg, the alliance’s executive director. “It suggests either that a) we are totally fooling ourselves; or b) people have an overly cynical idea of what drives newsrooms. It may be a bit of both.”

While the survey is focused on trust in media, the public has soured on a number of public institutions, so the press is hardly alone.

Of course, “political or commercial purposes” are distinctly different motivations. Are respondents envisioning political scheming in the newsroom, or, as Paul Simon sang:

“I don’t believe what I read in the papers
They’re just out to capture my dime”

To be clear, I’ve never seen anything in the newsrooms in which I’ve worked that could remotely be called political manipulation. Of the hundreds of journalists with whom I’ve worked, I could confidently guess the politics of only a handful. Those were not conversations in my newsrooms.

The right has, for decades, beat the drum about “liberal media,” a strategy that has proved successful among Republicans. It was the underlying premise of Fox News from its start. And CBS News is now led by Bari Weiss, who has built a career around the same argument.

As far as dimes are concerned, yes, the industry longs to — needs to — capture more. Perhaps we can find a path to restored trust that is paved with those dimes. We can only hope.