Christopher’s vision
Here’s the good news, and the bad news, for journalists troubled by declining trust in your profession: “Trust in the media” is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back to the emergence of survey data in the 1930s. The media’s commitment to the idea of the “public interest” and associated impartiality also dates roughly to the mid-20th century. Trust in the media has been declining for decades.
Meanwhile, a longer look at our collective past shows us that the current landscape of partisan and deeply divided American media — which coarsens and polarizes politics, spreads unreliable information and propaganda — is in many ways just a return to business as usual.
For most of American history, journalists and the press were openly and often sensationally partisan. The citizens expected that too. Politicians did that too. 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. Put another way, “echo chambers” once existed in the print world as much as they do now in the world of social media.
Likewise, America’s first presidential campaign season already featured its fair share of political fuss. In fact, the bad behavior of journalists is still infamous during the hotly contested election of 1800, Adams versus Jefferson, when the partisan press made controversial, hateful, and alarmist accusations designed to denigrate the opposing party and the party as much, if not more. to get. to build their own. Pro-Adams Federalist bodies spread rumors before (and especially after) the election (since confirmed) 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 that another Adams presidency would “continue a reign of terror, created by false alarm, to promote domestic feud and foreign war.”
Recommendations – much discussed this fall – were not created to objectively weigh the pros and cons of candidates. The press is essentially political. Business journalism provided some incentive for facts, but on the kinds of judgments we remember best—say, abolitionist newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison’s famous one—the press generally favored and took sides for much of American history. That’s what the readers expected. From before the birth of the Republic through the fumbling days of Upton Sinclair at the turn of the century, the press as a whole was less concerned with balanced reporting and impartially informing “the American people” than with reflecting and reinforcing biased views . beliefs of a small part of the public.
Objectivity and neutrality were generally products of the media consolidation that followed World War II, and of 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 outlets were what created the great expectations that 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 shows that there is no natural retreat to that era of more “objective” media, and no clear path to once again escape the inherently unreliable partisan journalism of America’s early history. George Washington warned in his 1796 farewell address, I have argued, that passions influenced by foreign influence, emerging new political parties, and rising factionalism posed the greatest threats to American democracy. As we look at our current political landscape, with foreign adversaries making mischief on social media, growing polarization, and a new class of powerful individuals and groups, it is hard not to hear Washington’s words as a warning for our own times.
