When a Dutch friend of mine texted me earlier this month in frustration over an interview with two voters of the incoming Far-Right nationalist government in the Netherlands in a major Dutch newspaper, I felt a familiar pang of guilt. My friend was incensed that the interviewing journalist had given a platform to right-wing voters but then failed to ask critical questions. “Most journalists nowadays are more interested in what sells than asking good questions,” he suggested. Are journalists really to blame for the rise of the Right?
Being a journalist myself, I am obviously predisposed to defend journalists. I tend to believe that the self-serving cynicism my friend alluded to is not compatible with journalism as a profession. As a result of shrinking newsrooms, journalism is becoming an increasingly economically precarious profession so I can’t imagine anyone joining this vocation to make money. I remain optimistic that the vast majority of journalists do their work because they believe it to be a public service. But the media not only serves the public by providing knowledge and facts but it also inevitably shapes the public discourse as well. It is a symbiotic relationship; one is reliant on the other.
I did not read the article my Dutch friend had read so I cannot speak about the specifics. But my first thought was that perhaps hearing from the people who had voted the Dutch Far-Right to power could be helpful for readers to grasp why this political change was happening in their country. Wouldn’t it be useful to know more about the people who chose the new government? What good does it serve if their motivations remain a mystery? Critics may argue that to assign complexity or nuance to the beliefs of people who voted for an obvious racist like Geert Wilders underscores the xenophobic truth of their voting priorities. But it doesn’t change the fact that Wilders and his voters won and their vision will be shaping the Netherlands for the next four years. Newspapers have a duty to reflect their audience back to themselves. ‘The Mirror’, or some variant of it, after all, is a common name for news products.
In one conversation with another friend particularly frustrated with The New York Times’s power to shape the public discourse and its unwillingness to use that power for what my friend saw as morally just positions, I tried to explain why newspapers that are considered ‘papers of record’ like the Times cannot openly take public, moral stances on most topics outside of the opinion section. Simply put: the thinking goes that papers of record only have the power they have because of the credibility they cultivate, and that credibility is based on impartial reporting.
What role the media plays in shaping the public discourse becomes a moral question as the world seems to get increasingly ugly. Are newspapers contributing to societies’ problems by platforming them? Or are they responding to real trends accurately? The media has been blamed for creating societal monsters before. According to the Oslo-based Center for Research on Extremism, the Far-Right Freedom Party of Austria was given “disproportionate exposure” throughout the 1980s that granted it with a political impact. In the United States of America, the former KKK grand wizard, David Duke, was given media attention due to the shocking nature of his campaign for governor of Louisiana. His campaign was ultimately unsuccessful but was nevertheless competitive. Les Moonves, the former chairman of CBS, one of America’s ‘big three’ broadcasters, once said ahead of the 2016 US presidential election about Donald Trump that he “may not be good for America, but [he’s] damn good for CBS.”
The symbiotic relationship between the news media and its audience is falling apart because consumers are sceptical about whether that relationship is mutual. Trust in media around the world is at an all-time low. According to an October 2023 Gallup poll, only 7% of Americans have high trust in the media, while 38% say they have no trust at all. This trend is reflected across the globe. Similar numbers are reported across Europe, with decreasing institutional trust as a near-universal trend. India typically reports high trust in the legacy media, but reports indicate that more than half of the Indians on social media networks get their news from those platforms rather than established media sources and that institutional trust is declining.
As a result, people seem to be turning away from news altogether. Broadcast news audiences continue to get older as younger generations forgo cable subscriptions. But younger people aren’t getting their news from social media or streaming platforms either. Meta announced it was deprecating its News feature on Facebook and Instagram. TikTok has long banned political advertising. Streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix don’t show traditional TV news. Instead, there has been an increase in the number of news commentators on social media platforms, none of which benefits from the cross-checking of facts by a team of editors and fact-checkers. As a result, younger people are, on an average, consuming less news. What they are getting tends to be socially or politically slanted.
In a 2013 exchange between Bill Keller and Glenn Greenwald published in The New York Times’s opinion section, the two journalists discussed two different traditions. Keller is a legendary Times reporter and columnist and the founder of the criminal-justice reporting platform, The Marshall Project. Greenwald came to journalism from an activist tradition, first as a lawyer and, then, as a blogger who gained international attention by breaking the Edward Snowden revelations about the National Security Administration. He then went on to found the Left-leaning publication, The Intercept. The title of the article — perhaps it was not chosen by Keller — posited “Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?” Keller represents the old guard and Greenwald the new. Keller is deeply institutional, while Greenwald founded a publication only to drop out to run a paid Substack that readers subscribe to. One delivers news via a loudspeaker, while the other whispers to you at a private party. What Greenwald and Keller were debating was not only how to ethically approach journalism but also what is the best way to maintain credibility and keep the audience’s trust.
By some measures, the title of the article was correct. Greenwald’s approach is how people are increasingly getting their news. As people turn away from traditional media and seek more tailored sources delivered to them via algorithm, they are finding voices that can respond more nimbly to the attitudes of their consumers as opposed to the more lumbering approach of traditional media. They can take more niche stances without the fear of losing credibility — they often gain trust in the process. The problem is that often these voices do not benefit from the structural rigour of a newsroom that holds its writers accountable to fact-checkers and editors, making what they produce far more prone to being misinformation.
But not all hope is lost. There is no doubt that this industry is changing. It is impossible to point a finger at what exactly is causing it — are audience attitudes changing on their own or are they being shaped by what the media produces? But what is clear is that people are hungry for news they can trust. And it is the job of journalists to figure out how to adapt.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in New York and Berlin from where she writes about Europe, politics and culture
