Fake News

Two Words That Broke the Press

Only 28% of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media to report the news factually and objectively. That number, reported by Gallup in 2025, is at a historical low since the organization began measuring media confidence in the 1970s, when trust hovered between 68 and 72%.
The collapse did not happen overnight, and it did not happen in a vacuum. Experts say it accelerated with two words, “fake news,” and a political strategy that made them stick.
Beginning in 2016, Donald Trump and his allies began deploying the phrase as a weapon against unfavorable coverage, first on the campaign trail and then from the White House. It spread across the country, the internet, and across party lines, giving politicians at every level a ready-made tool to discredit the press while simultaneously giving the public permission to reject any reporting they disliked.
Professors, journalists, and researchers now say the phrase didn’t expose a problem with the press so much as create one, quietly eroding the ground where facts and public trust meet. Nearly a decade later, the impact shows up in the data, in the newsroom, and in everyday American life.

A Slogan That Stuck
Misinformation and bias are nothing new. The internet age has long carried its own disclaimer, “don’t believe everything you see online.” But something shifted when social media migrated to the center of American politics, and politicians began to throw around the term “fake news,” a phrase that may sound like mere rhetoric, it proved anything but harmless.
“Humans respond to repetition. We like slogans,” said Stephen Monroe, chair and assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. “The phrase, ‘fake news,’ has been a highly effective dismissal because it closes dialogue, shuts down debate, and gives audiences a memorable way to express frustration and anger.”
Tai Takahashi, news director at WJTV/WHLT in Jackson, Mississippi, has more than 30 years in broadcast journalism. A National Edward R. Murrow Award and Emmy winner, he was inducted into the National Academy of Television Art and Sciences Silver Circle in 2021. He watched the shift in attitude toward the press happen in real time and placed its pivotal moment in 2016, at the start of Donald Trump’s first presidency.
“Around 2016 is when it started becoming a fevered pitch,” Takahashi said. “It became a rallying cry for people who didn’t like our coverage for one reason or another.”
Takahashi said the phrase has followed him even beyond his professional life. When people ask what he does for a living, the topic comes up as soon as he responds.
“And when I tell them [what I do], then they ask about the fake news,” he said.
Takahashi is careful not to treat the current hostility toward the press as something entirely new, since distrust of the media has been a recurring theme throughout American history. What’s different this time, he said, is the scale of the message amplification and the political will to keep it alive.
“It depends on how loudly that politician or that leader wants to bang that drum, and how big his echo chamber is at the time,” Takahashi said.

Institutional Erosion
Charles Mitchell, associate professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi and former managing and executive editor of The Vicksburg Post, doesn’t need to be convinced that hostility toward the press runs deep. He has spent years teaching media law and ethics and had watched the ground shift beneath journalism long before “fake news” entered the political discourse.
“The business model of traditional media went away when the internet arrived,” Mitchell said. The internet didn’t just change journalism; it rewired everyday life, according to him. “People no longer shop for houses or cars or groceries in their local paper.”
Then came shrinking newsrooms and a shift in how news was delivered. Mitchell said the rise of opinion-driven coverage, particularly on television, gave critics of the media genuine ground to stand on.
“Corporate journalism kind of took over in the media markets,” Mitchell said. “They went from the old days where you had journalists who delivered the newscast, to – instead of delivering the news they performed the news.”
When news operations began choosing sides politically for ratings, Mitchell said they handed politicians the ammunition they needed.
Takahashi agrees.
“If you align yourself with one side, then you’ve already lost the process,” Takahashi said. “You’re not being a journalist. And there are those organizations that say, well, we weren’t getting viewers when we were right down in the middle.”

Asymmetrical Political Attack vs Press Restraint
Monroe frames the problem in terms of how the phrase “fake news” operates on an audience. Politicians have always attacked the press, he said. What distinguishes the current moment is the discipline of the slogan, and the restraint of journalists when it comes to responding to it.
“Over time, politicians from all parties have sought to discredit news outlets and individual reporters,” Monroe said. “What makes the press an easy target is that good reporters are restrained and deliberate. They hesitate to defend themselves, even if the attacks are unfair.”
Monroe added that when a politician labels a story “fake news,” the press sometimes covers the accusation without adequately pushing back. That coverage then amplifies the original attack at no cost to the politician who made it.
The Gallup data shows how thoroughly the erosion of trust has spread across party lines, though not equally. Republican confidence in the mass media – defined as newspapers, TV and radio – has fallen to 8%, a historic low. Independent trust sits at 27%. Even among Democrats, who are historically more favorable to the press, only 51% now say they trust mainstream reporting.
Mitchell described the political history behind those numbers. He said running against the media has been a standard campaign tactic for generations, with every level of public office having used it. What changed is the intensity of the rhetorical attacks on the press.
Mitchell recalled a moment when students with the Daily Mississippian, the student newspaper of the University of Mississippi, traveled to a political campaign rally in Southaven, Miss. When speaker, Donald Trump, pointed toward the press section and called reporters enemies of the American people, those students feared for their safety.
“They were scared to death that that crowd was going to come beat them,” Mitchell said. “He had [the audience] into this frenzy of believing that he was the source of goodness and light and truth, and that these people were not and were hurting the country.”
“Of course, this is not a partisan issue,” Monroe said. “Over time, politicians from all parties have sought to discredit news outlets and individual reporters. Politicians are political beings. They are fighters.”
The incident reflects a pattern Monroe described in direct terms. When a politician dismisses an unflattering story as fake news, the press is slow to respond. Sometimes reporters will even cover the attack, amplifying it further, without offering a counterpoint. The asymmetry between the speed of a slogan and the deliberate pace of responsible journalism works against the press.

A Generational Divide
Younger Americans are less trusting than older ones. Among adults 65 and older, 43% still express confidence in the media. That figure drops to 28% or lower in every younger age group, according to Gallup’s data from 2023 to 2025. The generational gap has grown wider over the past decade.
Mitchell said today’s college students have grown up in a world where the distinction between news and rumor is much harder to see. No student currently enrolled at the University of Mississippi has lived in a place where a newspaper landed in the driveway every morning. He said that daily printed digest of verified information shaped how earlier generations evaluated sources. Without the tangible reporting of information, young people face a different challenge.
“[The younger] generation is going to have to be more careful about deciding who to believe and deciding what to believe,” Mitchell said.
He described experiments that circulated years ago in which people posted false claims about the deaths of famous individuals to see how quickly they spread online. The false reports went viral in under 90 minutes. Months later, the same posts resurfaced and the same thing happened again.
The structural change Mitchell described goes beyond social media habits. He said the rise of perspective-driven coverage on television and online platforms gave audiences permission to seek out only the reporting that confirmed what they already believed. Journalists who tried to present both sides found their numbers declining, but Takahashi said the objective reporting process is still important.
“We tend to lose trust when we deviate too much from what it means to be a journalist,” Takahashi said.

The Path Forward
Steve Herman spent five years covering the White House for Voice of America and more than two decades reporting across Asia before joining the University of Mississippi as founding executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation, which works to strengthen the role of a free press in American public life. He sees journalism’s trust problem as structural and does not believe it will be easily reversed.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to fix this problem,” Herman said. “I’m quite pessimistic.”
Herman said the deeper issue is not distrust of the press but a growing indifference to the distinction between truth and entertainment. When audiences encounter misinformation and are told it is false, a growing number of people do not change their minds.
“I don’t care whether it’s not true because it was funny or I liked it. It made me feel good,” Herman said, describing the attitude he now encounters regularly. “That’s what I’m worried about, that in our society, news is no longer even valued because it is informative or helpful or truthful.”
Herman drew a comparison to reality television, where audiences accept staged scenes because the format is entertaining. He said news is drifting toward the same standard, and fact-checking organizations and new verification tools will not be enough if audiences have stopped caring about the truth.
Despite that pessimism, none of the journalists or academics interviewed suggested that journalists stop reporting the news. Takahashi said the job does not change because the public is skeptical. It requires the same commitment to accuracy whether or not that accuracy is trusted.
“We have a job to do, so we continue to do it,” Takahashi said. “If people question it, then that’s part of our job too, is to answer those questions.”
Takahashi added that the scrutiny, while uncomfortable, functions as a check on journalists themselves. He said he reads his reporters’ scripts looking for adjectives that carry opinion. When a reporter writes comments such as “this is so sad,” he removes the phrase. “That’s not for us to say,” said Takahashi.
“When it comes to opinion, that’s not what we’re there to do,” Takahashi said. “It hasn’t really changed it, but it has made us more hyper aware of what people want and what people expect of us.”
Monroe said the majority of American journalists still follow ethical practices and report with care. The problem is structural. They are outnumbered on platforms where speed, outrage, and rumor move faster than verified news reporting.
“The majority of American journalists remain trustworthy, and they follow sound and ethical practices,” Monroe said. “Unfortunately, they have very few defenders and they are not very good at defending themselves.”
Mitchell said he sees the current moment as a period of reckoning rather than a permanent collapse. The press has survived other threats, and he said journalism will find its footing again, but the work of earning trust back falls on reporters and editors, not on audiences.
Monroe said the stakes are high.
“Our American system depends on a free and independent press,” Monroe said. “We should not be surprised when politicians attack the credibility of reporters, but as informed citizens, we should be skeptical of such attacks. We have to weigh the evidence ourselves, consider the motivations, evaluate the sources, and come to a rational conclusion about who is telling the truth and who is not.”