How NPR lost the public's trust

[Dill]

(04-09-2024, 05:51 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I forget which podcast I was listening to, but it was a very interesting self-reflection in journalism during and post-Trump. It may have been on an episode of the aforementioned 1A. They talked about one of the problems being not knowing how to cover Trump and being dismissive of him prior to his election. Then his attacks resulted in almost a vengeful position from the media in response and becoming very aggressive. This resulted in handling him with a little more kid gloves in some instances and swinging things too far in the other direction in some instances. Part of the issue is that any attempt to fact check him has been seen as an attack by him and his followers, leading to the confusion.

Certainly Trump posed problems never seen before.  Since the advent of radio and television, I doubt there is a political candidate anywhere who could have survived the Hollywood access tape; but Trump did, and went on to do much worse; now polls show enough people may want the chaos back to actually re-elect him.

So there is a more fundamental problem here than whether MSM coverage went too far or lost some "balance."  The response to fact-checking Trump which you mention indicates it. A mass audience was already groomed to regard accurate reporting itself as evidence of "bias"; Trump's instincts led him to capitalize on that, attacking the MSM as "fake news" and "the enemy of the people." 

I.e., Journalists doing what journalism SHOULD do became a primary reason for attacking journalism. 

While considering changes in journalism, people might also want to consider the great change in news consumers as well.

(04-09-2024, 05:51 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: In addition to all of this you have the changing media landscape where the marketplace of ideas is flooded with information of all sorts and this makes more traditional media sources have far less of the market share than they once did. We don't have to rely on the airwaves or the newsstand for our information, it's all out there on the various sites. This changes the business model for these companies, including the non-profit ones. They are in a constant struggle for eyeballs and clicks that their old models weren't going to gain them. NPR's stereotypical programming isn't going to attract most Millennials and younger. The Associated Press doesn't present information in a way that stands out. Investigative reporting from anyone is just going to hold the attention of most people. As a result, these things we have relied on for so long are losing traction and when they try to modernize to compete they lose credibility with the masses.

First and second bolded are the ground of the problem, plus what you've bolded in the quote below. When you start with the vast changes in technology and law which occurred in the '80s and '90s, you are less likely to mistake effects for causes.
 
Now multiple competing news sources can have all the trimmings of authority--fancy news room and streaming banners and well-groomed professional faces. And we no longer (if we ever did) have mass audiences which can discriminate well between them, in terms of quality vetting and investigation. When news is commodified, and this kind of news "market" appears, then Fox-style balance--"You decide, then we report"--is going to increase that sort of news consumer to critical, election-deciding mass.

(04-09-2024, 05:51 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Plus, as much as people like to claim they want unbiased news sources, the majority don't understand biases in media coverage and they often continue to rely on sources with those slants that they align with. If they do look at media they disagree with to claim they do, they essentially hate read it.

Boy howdy.  This is closer to the immediate driver.  I'd add that nowadays many news consumers start and end with fuzzy labels like "Left" and "right," finding something they call "bias" everywhere, retreating to authorities they can "trust," like Trump and Hannity. Trump is himself a master of this approach, as he has become THE alternate source of authoritative news for 10s of millions of Americans. (But as I intimate above, he cannot be the "cause" of that, just the beneficiary.)

So you've got people who have not thought very much about what "bias" is while finding it everywhere, or what an "unbiased" alternative to "liberal media" would look like.