The Massey Essay: The Trust Spiral

Restoring faith in the media

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After months of research and writing, I’m pleased to be able to share an excerpt of the 2024 Massey Essay on the state of the media, which is out today. To continue reading “The Trust Spiral,” please visit the Literary Review of Canada. (No paywall on the first three articles.) Look forward to hearing your thoughts! — TH

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The day after the 2016 United States presidential election, the team behind New York Public Radio’s On the Media recorded an editorial meeting that was then broadcast to its million-plus weekly listeners. In a raw and unfiltered segment, the hosts, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, and their executive producer, Katya Rogers, processed feelings of shock and fear and anger, contemplated mistakes they may have made covering Donald Trump’s campaign, and pondered how they might approach the new administration. Given that they believed Trump’s presidency was a “historic threat to our democracy and to our values,” the central dilemma, as articulated by Garfield, was whether the show should continue moving in the direction of advocacy journalism —“amp up the skepticism and outrage”— or whether they should pull back as more dispassionate observers.

“Do we try to approach our jobs as leaders of a movement for truth and justice?” Garfield asked. “Or do we just try to do our jobs as journalists covering journalism, and let the rest sort itself out? I’m not sure we can do exactly both at the same time.” To which Gladstone replied, “I guess I would say I think we can do exactly both at the same time.” A type of conversation that typically happens behind closed doors was taking place out in the open, and audiences were listening as new editorial standards seemed to take shape.

Those eighteen emotionally charged minutes of radio effectively took an emerging opinion — that Trump was dangerous and covering him ethically necessitated an abandonment of the news media’s characteristic detachment — and placed it squarely within the mainstream. The segment sent ripples out to the furthest reaches of the North American press corps, to journalists who didn’t even hear it and likely never would. It helped usher in an activist-oriented era in media, one that wreaked havoc on journalism’s credibility and set in motion an accelerating downward spiral of trust that continues to this day: according to the latest data from Statistics Canada, just 16 percent of Canadians report “a high level . . . of trust in information and news from the media.”

Understanding this spiral is essential for making sense of the crisis in Canadian media and for forging a sustainable path forward for our fourth estate. To unpack it, we must begin by looking at its origins in the U.S. and the hysteria that initially drove it.

An existential crisis. Leading up to the 2016 election, the U.S. media collectively lost its cool. Trump had long been a source of entertainment, a smug punchline, a ratings boon. But as election day neared, his habit of disparaging the press began to grate, and his knack for dominating the news cycle with outlandish claims started to raise legitimate alarms. The feeling that Trump was an extraordinary candidate, and that ordinary journalism was insufficient to the task of covering him, began to solidify.

David Mindich, a journalism professor at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont at the time, detailed a “launch moment” for the shift in the Columbia Journalism Review, noting in July 2016 a change in tone among the likes of Megyn Kelly, Anderson Cooper, and Jake Tapper, who had all become more openly confrontational. Mindich characterized the conundrum facing the press corps as a “Murrow moment,” in reference to Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who famously set aside his own detachment to speak out against Joseph McCarthy in 1954: “If a politician’s rhetoric is dangerous, Murrow implied, all of us, including journalists, are complicit if we don’t stand up and oppose it.”

Writing in the New York Times the following month, Jim Rutenberg was even more explicit. “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” Rutenberg asked. “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.” Rutenberg conceded that would be a move into “uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”

The verdict was in: These were not normal times. Extreme threats called for extreme measures. Trump triggered an existential crisis in the press, and many observers were terrified by what they saw as creeping fascism. The media panicked and pulled down its guardrails, a move that many argued was justified by the exceptional circumstances. Guardrails exist for a reason, though, and discarding them came with unintended consequences.

To continue reading the 2024 Massey Essay on the state of the media, please visit the Literary Review of Canada. (There’s no paywall for the first three articles.)