How Did the Media Lose Our Trust?

The 2004 comedy Anchorman opens with the observation that “there was a time…when people believed everything they heard on TV”. The joke is grounded in reality: the movie is set in the early ’70s when nearly 75 per cent of people trusted the mass media. On average today, less than half do. Depending on age, political affiliation and nation, often many less.

Trust in the media was been declining for years but from 2016 on it was irrevocably broken. Across the world, data show a steady decline for decades; a plummet over a cliff from 2016 onward. Donald Trump broke the media, then made them a laughing stock. When Rachel Maddow wept at the 2016 election result, the gig was up. When Trump pointed at CNN’s Jim Acosta and declared, “You are fake news,” the mainstream media were humiliated.

There was a brief uptick during the early months of the Covid pandemic, as a panicked public turned to the legacy media. But, as the truth about Covid, especially its origins, became more and more undeniable, public fury went white-hot. Fool them once…

How did things come to such a pass? It’s entirely of the media’s own making – and they’re incapable of even seeing that. When you see the legacy media wringing their hands about ‘misinformation’ and so forth, bear in mind that they actually believe it’s everyone’s problem but theirs. The media is incapable of even understanding how badly they’ve screwed themselves, and why.

The root of the issue, as with so many of modern society’s ills, begins with academia.

Once upon a time, journalists were more like tradesmen: beginning their careers as copyboys, whose main role was to run errands and deliver typed articles (‘copy’) between different departments such as the reporters and subeditors. Thus gaining a working knowledge of how a newspaper was run, they gradually worked their way up to junior reporting, usually covering easy ‘beats’ and progressing to harder news as they proved their chops.

Nowadays, legacy media journalists almost always enter the field via a degree – and that’s from where the problems stem. As a relatively recent journalism graduate, I speak from experience.

Like most humanities disciplines, journalism schools are almost entirely dominated by the left. The only ideological diversity represented is from left to far-left. Marx is required reading. Other required readings, such as the almost-universally set text for journalism ethics, are written by open Marxists (ironically, the Marxist academic in question was allowed to resign from his position over a breach of academic ethics: mechanics have the worst cars, as the saying goes).

Still, students are given what used to be the absolute basics: briefly and with as little lip-service as possible. Kipling’s ‘Six Honest Serving Men’ (What, Why, When, How, Where, Who) are mentioned in the first week or two of a first semester unit and then forgotten. The same goes with what was once the bedrock axiom of journalism: When reporting the news, never, NEVER mix opinion with reporting.

When reporting the news, never, NEVER mix opinion with reporting.

Both of those principles are quickly superseded by what modern journalism sees as its prime directive: ‘Speaking truth to power’.

Just how skewed the balance of journalism training has become can be gauged from a recent editorial in one of the most senior legacy media titles, arguing that simply reporting the facts is often opposed to what they see as their core mission: influencing public opinion. It’s not coincidental, by the way, that this shift occurred almost concurrently with a similar seismic shift in science: the shift to so-called ‘Post-Normal Science’, which argues explicitly that ‘rigorous truth-telling’ must come second to ‘policy influence’.

This is all the language of Marxism.

In the Marxist worldview of the modern humanities faculty, power is everything. In their fantasy land, there are only oppressors (the evil white, capitalist, straight and Christian patriarchy) and the oppressed (the noble, brown, queer, Muslim and female). Student journalists are no longer taught to just report the facts. Indeed, they’re openly taught by critical theory-obsessed academics that there are no facts. There is only ‘your truth’, identity politics and, above anything else, power.

As they progress through their degree, journalism students are loaded with nonsensical course units like ‘gender, race and journalism’, and ‘journalism and society’. These courses will often explicitly expound ‘Marxist and feminist perspectives’ and ‘examine society through the lens of race, gender and power’.

Older and wiser students such as myself could at least be able to see through the monomanias of their lecturers and form their own opinions. Well, a decade or more when I did my degree, perhaps. Universities are, more and more, enforcing a stifling intellectual conformity, where to kick against the pricks of Marxist groupthink is to court failure (the only paper I ever failed was one in which I openly criticised Marx).

Even without such enforced ideological comformity, the problem is that most journalism students are 19-year-olds: just out of high school, very impressionable and, frankly, naïve and ignorant. Consequently, most of them uncritically lap up their professors’ bullshit.

And then they’re released into the wide world of media – a media which has changed immeasurably in recent years.

First, technology made copyboys redundant. Journalists know longer know the nuts and bolts of media production as they used to. Technology, specifically the rise of online media, also has starved the mainstream media of money and led to mass layoffs.

Unfortunately, the first to get the axe were senior journalists and especially sub editors. Once upon a time, these old hands would curb the enthusiasms of the bright young things.

Not any more. In fact, the mass retrenchment of experienced journalists means that these indoctrinated juniors are more often than not bumped up into senior roles far faster than they ever should have and without ever having had their youthful idiocy knocked out of them. So people who are still mentally student reporters are now running the newsroom. It’s why supposed ‘papers of record’ read like a red-ragging campus paper.

It’s also why the mainstream media repeatedly commits what was once the the cardinal sin of journalism: mixing opinion and reporting. Not just because they don’t care anyway, but because they can’t even understand that they’re doing.

What is the difference between ‘news, comment and opinion’? News is what journalists commonly call ‘hard news’ – the ‘just the facts’ reporting of who, what, when, where, why and how. In the hardcopy world of print journalism, hard news is commonly what’s in the front pages of the paper. News reporting is supposed to strictly report the facts without inserting the reporter’s opinions.

An excellent illustration of a reporter transgressing this principle comes from the Centre for News Literacy: in the first clip, CNBC market reporter Rick Santelli gives a straight stockmarket report. Just the facts. In the second, without anything to indicate that this is an opinion piece, Santelli vents his personal political opinions, which are not facts, obviously.

(Note that even the CNL’s chosen example betrays the ideological bent of even supposed gatekeepers of modern ‘journalism’: Santelli’s outburst is widely viewed as the ground zero of the ‘Tea Party’ movement. Even the examples the media use to illustrate bias are as illustrative of their own bias.)

The point is not that journalists aren’t allowed to have political opinions, or write about them – the point is that opinion pieces should be clearly identified as such. Indeed, newspapers usually quarantine opinion pieces in their own section of the paper. Otherwise, opinion pieces are clearly labelled as such.

Of course, news reporters always have to make decisions about what to put in or leave out of a story according to ‘news values’, the things that make an item newsworthy (or not) for a publication’s given audience. Good Oil readers, for instance, are unlikely to be interested in coverage of Milan Fashion Week. Variety subscribers are vanishingly unlikely to want to read about local government elections in Hamilton. That’s just the normal business of selling papers (or page views).

What is important, though, is that, as Stephen Lamble says, in his News As It Happens journalism primer, “there should be no clues in a journalist’s work about her or his political leaning”. Unless, of course, they’re an opinion writer, who’s job is very much to expound their political leaning.

Instead, though, when it comes to the legacy media, we see their political leaning constantly shoved in our faces, even – no, especially in – supposed hard-news reporting. And it only ever goes one way.

Consider how many times on any given day you’ll come across the phrases ‘far right’, ‘extreme right’ and so on, in legacy media reporting. “Pauline Hanson, the leader of the far-right anti-immigration One Nation Party” (New York Times). “Far-right Israeli politician’s visa cancelled ahead of speaking tour”, “Far-right Sanseitō party”, “far-right leader Geert Wilders”, “French far-right politician Marine Le Pen” (all ABC Australia). And so on: a search of the expression “far right” turns up 30 pages of results on Google News in just the past 24 hours alone.

We’ve been so pummelled by this journalistic sleight-of-hand that we almost don’t notice it any more. What sleight-of-hand, you ask?

Take the headline, “Pauline Hanson, the leader of the far-right anti-immigration One Nation Party”. The only facts in that headline is that Pauline Hanson is the leader of the One Nation Party. “Anti-immigration” is a direct lie: One Nation’s policy is “a common-sense immigration policy”, capping visas at 130,000 per year. A party which wants 130,000 migrants per year is clearly not “anti-immigration”.

As for “far-right”, that’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. Certainly, Hanson disputes that claim. So, while it’s a fact that she is the leader of the One Nation party, “far-right” is purely the opinion of the journalist. The same applies to Le Pen, Wilders or anyone else the media routinely report as ‘far-right’.

On the other hand, one almost never hears the opposite designation, ‘far-left’. Compared to the 30 pages of results in 24 hours for “far-right”, “far-left” turns up just five.

So, while Hanson is routinely dubbed ‘far-right’, violent radicals such as Antifa or Socialist Alternative are almost never dubbed ‘far-left’, nor is, say, Guardian columnist Van Badham, who openly describes herself as an “anarcho-syndicalist/libertarian communist”.

The Guardian indeed has an entire section dedicated to what it believes are the ‘far-right’, which apparently seems to be everyone the Guardian just happens to dislike, from Nigel Farage to Donald Trump. Perhaps as an indication of how idiotic the blanket tag of ‘far-right’ has become, one of the stories in the Guardian’s ‘far-right’ section concerns the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK – which, when one reads the actual text, is largely linked to Islamic terrorist attacks and anti-Semitism in the left-wing of UK Labour.

This journalistic deceit is practised again and again and again, in media across the ideological spectrum, and almost nobody bats an eyelid. How do journalists keep getting away with such a flagrant breach of basic standards? Because both journalists and audiences have been conditioned to not even notice. As Crimes Against Logic author Jamie Whyte says, it’s “so common that we have become desensitized”.

Ed West has argued that there is a deep institutional bias in Western education that routinely demonises the right and indulges the crimes of the left: the enormities of the Nazis are (rightly) never forgotten, while the even-more hideous crimes of the communists are almost never mentioned. Polling has shown that most young people really don’t even know what socialism is but have this vague notion that it’s somehow benign. Put simply, the lesson repeatedly driven home is that ‘right=bad, left=good’.

But “why do journalists mention this right versus left business at all?”, Jamie Whyte asks. Because, conditioned to this Manichean worldview of right-bad/left-good, ‘far-right’ becomes an almost-undetectable way for journalists to slant their stories against a subject. As Milo Yiannopoulos retorted to a BBC reporter, “you’re doing it because you want to suggest that there is something nefarious about my belief system”.

Like pantomime prompts holding up ‘Boo! Hiss!’ signs behind a villain, journalists insert ‘far-right’ as a subtle ad hominem attack, a shorthand label for their audience to recognise that this is a bad person.

But the whole point is that that’s just the journalist’s opinion. That a person like Yiannopoulos has certain political views is a fact, and reporting that, say, he supports Donald Trump, or opposes Third-Wave Feminism, would be to report facts. That he identifies as a conservative is also a fact. But that his views are so extreme as to qualify as ‘far-right’ is not a fact – that’s an opinion. Journalists who report that opinion as news are inserting their political leanings into their work as reporters, which violates the basic standards of their craft.

The reason they keep doing it is because they’re too indoctrinated to notice, should they even deign to care.

The only reason they get away with it is because we too have been assiduously conditioned not to notice it.