A Crisis of Trust in Mass Media

Xiaoyun Ma

xm445015@ohio.edu

Source: Community Journalism 

Trust in mass media has hit the historical low-point. Only one-fifth of Americans adults believe in the news they get from national news organizations, according to Pew Research Center.

It seems trendy to have anger in lies in mass media. The news organizations, the advertising corporations, and politicians seemingly ally to feed the public lies. People doubt and question everything they read in the news. And now, both mass media and the public have been stuck in the middle of the trust crisis. How did things end up like this? "American's trust level in the media has drifted downward over the past decade, But some of the loss in trust may have been self-inflicted," said Rebecca Riffkin, a Gallup News analyst.

According to the elements of journalism, journalists' first obligation is informing nothing but truth and facts other than stating their opinions. However, when it comes to partisan politics, journalists and news corporations tend to take sides. Thirty-four percent of national news organization identified as liberal, in contrast to 7 percent conservative, according to Pew Research Center. Like we all know that Fox is leaning right, as opposed to CNN and The New York Times is leftward. While the news giants are keen on taking sides, and the partisan issues of news contents are rapidly growing, the objectivity of stories is fading away.

Around the presidential election, trust in mass media has consistently declined. It started in 2004, and now it crumbled last year. President Trump has criticized liberal mainstream media for being unfair to him, and he even tweeted "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people." It somehow explains why trust in the mainstream media has melted down among Republicans.

Since faith in mass media has collapsed, what about social media? People seem always hold confused feelings on social media (Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube). People use Twitter to keep up the latest news and share the opinion; meanwhile, it contains countless misleading information and untrue contents. According to The New York Times, a false post about Trump was shared 16,000 times on Twitter.

People criticized news agencies and journalists of mainstream media for being dishonest and biased on the stories they covered. Nonetheless, people could make mistakes easily on the social media, and everyone could accidentally turn into fake news sharers, even makers. The public probably just put too much expectation on journalists, but they are not flawless. They make honest mistakes; it could be a typo or a misplaced comma which could misrepresent the meaning of the whole sentence. And the facts they found could be proved wrong next day.

To own a positive suspect on media, first, we should analyze the source. How many sources does the news possess? Are these sources objective and credible? Second, publication and writers. Does the story come from an authoritative news organizations or authors? Third, timelines. Check the date of publication and the content recent enough. Fourth, what is the purpose of the news story?

 Rebuilding the trust of mass media have a long way to go, but mass media can start with covering more both sides stories, social media can develop more sophisticated fact checking system, and the public can obtain better self-reflection and healthy skepticism.