As the media struggle, how much blame can be put on waning trust?

While news outlets continue to rely on exploiting workers to keep the doors open, journalist unions are fighting back, but a solution to keeping both sides happy first requires regaining the public's trust.

By Bobby Cavano

Towards the chilly heel of 2022 in New York City, over 1,100 employees from the New York Times were turning up the heat. In a nearly unprecedented decision, journalists and media professionals from the paper went on a 24 hour strike during stalling contract negotiations. The reason for this strike? Unfair wages. According to an article from The Guardian covering the strike, “A major point of conflict in negotiations is a wage increase that averages out to 2.875%, far less than the 5% average increase the union has asked for”. The paper heralded for its left-leaning principles was not fairly paying its workers for their time investments and was refusing to budge on salaries. Despite the strike being almost unheard of, itself the first NYT worker’s strike in over 40 years, it stands as a singular moment in the landscape of newsroom employees unionizing and fighting for fair pay over the past decade. According to a 2021 article from Poynter titled “Not just a wave, but a movement: journalist’s unionize at record numbers”, workers at news outlets had launched over 200 unions in the past decade, 90% of which were successful. In 2020 alone 37 newspaper unions were publicly established, all which were successful. Going back to that same winter of 2022 in Texas, 20 journalists at the Fort Worth Star Telegram went on their own union strike. When interviewed for an article with the Texas Observer, Kathy Johnson, justice reporter and vice president of the Telegram's union, recounted the impact of the strike for the workers, outlining how “the longer we were on strike, the more pressure they did feel to compromise with us, and that ultimately is what led to us being able to have those wins … so I guess striking does work''. The Telegram’s staff had begun union bargaining in 2020 and wasn’t the only Texas paper to do so; others included the Dallas Morning News and Austin American-Statesman, these being the only unionized papers in Texas in nearly 30 years. With this uptick in newspaper unions and bargaining for worker’s rights it stands to beg the question: why aren’t newspapers paying their journalists fairly?

The answer lies within the very same article from the Texas Observer, as one of the later paragraphs details that “Like most in the industry, the Morning News is facing economic headwinds. Its digital subscription base is up eightfold since 2016, but that hasn’t compensated for the relentless decline in print subscriptions and profitable print advertising”. According to this 2022 study by Northwestern Local News Initiative, there have been over 2 newspaper closures per week since even before the pandemic, and as a country, the United States has lost one fourth of its total newspapers since 2005, on track to lose a third by 2025. As of today, Northwestern estimates that over seventy million people live in over 200 counties without a newspaper in the United States, and continued closures will only increase the number of these news deserts, where, according to this Governing article “the collective narratives of a community reported by independent experts at storytelling and information-gathering will simply vanish”. Northwestern further details the dire rates of newsroom employment as continually declining “Since 2005, when newspaper revenues topped $50 billion, overall newspaper employment has dropped 70 percent as revenues declined to $20 billion”. News outlets are hemorrhaging staff and continuously losing revenue, leading to a reliance on overworking and underpaying employees to remain in business.

Despite these unethical business practices, solutions remain difficult to locate. In the same article from the Texas Observer, Leah Waters, a housing reporter at the Morning News and chair of the Dallas NewsGuild labor union, gives a solution to the the Fort Worth Star Telegram’s financial troubles. Instead of focusing on a profit incentive, she suggests going non profit because “The business model isn’t working, but the solution isn’t to continue to erode workers’ rights and working conditions and then by default, the product of local journalism”. Although this solution could preserve some struggling outlets, going non profit isn’t so simple. In an opinion article from Politico, senior media writer Jack Shafer explores the potential for newspapers to go nonprofit through the example of the Chicago Sun Times. Shafer pointedly states that even though “The Chicago marriage looks swell on paper…don’t try to replicate this in your city unless you have a big cast of deep-pocketed philanthropists to tap”. After ownership of the paper was shifted to the Chicago Public Media, considered by Shafer to be more of a “dowry” than acquisition, “An argument could be made that the Sun-Times' previous owners, which include Chicago businesspeople and labor organizations, were already running the money-losing paper as a philanthropic venture. The deal merely moves their money-losing investment into the nonprofit tax space where losses won’t be as severe”, as even when going nonprofit the paper operates at a loss, kept in business by good-will donations and philanthropic investment.

As for-profit and nonprofit papers continue to struggle financially, reasons for this vary between continued loss of print media and drive to the digital space, but a further potential reason is a lack of trust by the public. In a Pew Research Center paper published in June of 2022, a group of journalists as well as nearly 10,000 U.S. adults were surveyed on journalist practices and the decline in public trust, then statistics were then drawn to outline their differences in opinion.

Only 41% of U.S. adults think the news is covering the most important stories of the day and only 35% think the news is reported accurately, compared to the 43% who think the news does a bad job of reporting accurately. Despite how dire those numbers are, they continue to dip further on the questions of representation and misinformation. Only 24% of U.S. adults think that the news does a good job of giving voice to the underrepresented, compared to 45% who think they do a somewhat or very bad job, and only 25% think the news does a good job of managing or correcting information, as opposed to a 51% majority who think that the news does a somewhat or even very bad job at this. The fact that journalists across the board voted much higher than U.S. adults in these categories indicates 1) a potentially clear bias towards their career and 2) a potential discrepancy between writers and the public on the state of journalism. Journalists still have some idea of the public's waning trust as later in the article they were asked to give a word they think the public would use to describe the news, and over 90% chose a negative word, “Biased” , “Untrustworthy”, “Inaccurate” and “Partisan” accounting for almost 60% of all responses, but 83% of journalists still feel somewhat or very connected to their audience (37% somewhat connected, 46% very connected), despite only 26% of U.S. adults feeling very connected to their main news outlets, compared to 36% who feel little to no connection. A better understanding of the public’s dropping trust in recent years would help journalists to find personal solutions and potentially help to reconnect with their audience.

Organizational Graph From Pew Research Center

(Gottfried, Jeffrey, Mitchell, Amy, Jurkowitz, Mark, Liedke, Jacob “Journalists and the American public stand far apart on how well they think news outlets do in many of their core function” Pew Research Center June 14th, 2022)

Connection Graph From Pew Research Center

(Gottfried, Jeffrey, Mitchell, Amy, Jurkowitz, Mark, Liedke, Jacob “Journalists feel more connected to their audience than the public does to their news outlets” Pew Research Center June 14th, 2022)

Even if journalists do manage to reconnect with their own audience, the larger issue still remains; if the public doesn't trust the news, how can the news survive? To forge a path towards accountability and regaining trust, the media needs to first understand how it lost trust in the first place. Despite a common misconception that Donald Trump’s “fake news” presidential campaigns were the main factor in waning media trust, this article by Courthouse News Service outlines that trust in media hit an all-time low in 2015, before Trump’s campaign had truly taken off. In this article the loss of trust is discussed by Sally Lehrman, the founder of a group dedicated to news transparency named the Trust Project, as she analyzes how “We now have partisan-driven sites that are made to look like news and even have names that make them sound like a local news company. And then we see misinformation flood into system”. Blurring opinion and news reporting sustains a diet of potential bias and misinformation in public media consumption and could easily be a root cause for loss of trust, made even worse by a lack of regulations on the internet. If news outlets don’t appropriately separate opinions from facts and have their journalists detail these differences, readers can misread a perspective as objective, and misunderstand articles and the stories they cover.

A potential cure for trust issues is provided by the Aspen Institute in an article titled “Ten Ways to Rebuild Trust in Media and Democracy”, in which the first solution explores the idea of applied industry wide standards in how information is collected, reported, and disseminated. These standards would force outlets to hold writers and data collectors accountable for how information is written and distributed, letting readers know where their information comes from and how it was extracted. An article from Clive Cook of the Washington Post provides another method to attack the issue through a suggestion by a former executive editor of the paper to denounce objectively, “Objective by whose standard?” being the inspiration for the piece. This article questions the heralded journalistic law of “objectivity" and considers how universally accepting this principle could lose readers by attempting to appeal too broadly without a grounded and solidified perspective. Providing a set of maintained principles for a journalist could gain a reader’s trust as they see the viewpoint and context of an article and can choose to read it with that forewarning. In my opinion, the largest reaching solution to regaining and maintaining reader trust lies between the answers by the Aspen Institute and the Post. It is necessary for transparent standards 0f information collection to be applied, but this wouldn’t save public trust in journalism by itself. Losing the guise of “objectivity” has potential to help readers understand the individuality in a journalist's perspective, but could backfire if the public interprets this as “biased” writing. A journalist can lay out the objective facts of a case, be transparent about the methods used for obtaining that information, then outline their perspective on the story, highlighting what led them to their conclusion. Following these steps allows the reader to form their opinion based on the facts provided, then gives them professional insight from a journalist who was close to the story. The key to having transparency is outlining the separation between the objective story and the journalist interpretation of the story, so the reader fully understands what they’re consuming. How can you trust a meal if the chef won’t tell you the ingredients, where they came from, or how they were handled ? This can be applied to journalism, as when stories are prepped for the oven, Journalists easily could keep track of their sources and write down the recipe for how they got information, before describing their opinion on the meal. Financially, regaining reader trust and connecting with a larger audience through these methods would not be an end-all be-all, but would allow for revitalization of profits by strengthening belief in newspapers and helping convince a larger swath of the public to pick them up at the grocery store. Outlets wouldn’t need to continue to rely on underpaid labor, and this could give unions a better foodhold for bargaining, potentially leading to healthier writing and living habits for employees, improving the quality of work, and hopefully public trust, even further.