Why Doesn't Anyone Trust The Media?
Journalism’s crisis of trust with Ben Smith and Nayeema Raza
Spotify | Apple | YouTube | Amazon
Hello listeners,
Well, It turns out our episode about Donald Trump's incredible political comeback ended up being remarkably timely and prescient. Thanks again to Mike, Emily, and everyone who shared their thoughts on how Trump achieved what no other politician in history has managed to do.
In the wake of the election results, many Democrats are doing some serious soul-searching (and a fair amount of blame-gaming) to understand why they lost. Some are even suggesting it’s time to engage voters in good faith on difficult issues, like the participation of trans athletes in women’s sports. Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton recently said:
“We tried to cancel people rather than actually having debates about issues that Americans care about… What does it say to American voters if people in our own party can’t even have this debate?”
Matt, Megan Phelps-Roper, and I have spent significant time reporting on the nuances and challenges of this debate - as well as the pressure to cancel people, instead of engaging them. This feels like an appropriate moment to revisit The Witch Trials of JK Rowling series, along with the two follow-up episodes of Reflector we released this summer. (If you’ve already listened, maybe consider sharing them with a friend who’d find them useful).
But it’s not just Democrats reckoning with a loss of trust. New polling from places like Gallup shows historically high levels of distrust in journalists. Meaning that a profession built on the delivery of trusted information is now in the midst of a full on crisis of mistrust.
How did we get here? What are we doing wrong? And what, if anything, can we—or should we—do to regain that trust?
For today’s episode, we take a frank look at the media’s role in this crisis with Ben Smith and Nayeema Raza.
Ben Smith is the co-founder of Semafor, a news organization with ambitious goals to redefine global journalism. He’s the former media columnist for The New York Times and was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, leading it from a scrappy startup to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom. Ben’s journalism roots trace back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, where he covered crime and New York politics for local papers. He was part of the early journalism blogging era online, reported on the 2008 Obama campaign for Politico, and embodies a no-nonsense ethos to journalism that I’ve come to admire over the years.
Nayeema Raza is (alongside Ben) the co-host on Semafor’s media podcast Mixed Signals, which explores how money, culture, and politics shape everything we read, watch, and hear. She has worked as executive producer at The New York Times Opinion and frequently guest-hosts Open to Debate. With a background in film and documentary, Nayeema often draws fascinating parallels between newsroom trends and what’s happening in Hollywood and beyond.
As you’ll hear, the three of us don’t always agree. In this episode, I’m a bit more open with my views than usual—we even scrutinize some of my past work. Together, we wrestle with the causes and context of the current trust crisis in journalism, explore historical parallels, discuss the disruption of the internet and influence of social media, and unpack lessons from the Trump era so far.
As always we love to hear your feedback, send us an email at hello@reflector.show
Happy listening,
Andy (and Matt).
Man these two guests media people need to take a sabbatical and go do any job where they're actually held accountable.
The constant deflecting the inability to just say "Yeah we messed up on latinx, this is why, and here's how we can fix it next time"
But no just "Industry trends 🤷"
Stay dying Media.
This was a really interesting podcast, and it made me more positive that the mainstream media has no clue how much they are actually hated and despised. And these two guests pretending to masquerade as centrist reasonable media skeptics speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
This whole thing felt like a murderers brother on the witness stand blaming the weather, an influx of people wearing cargo shorts in culture, and irritating tonal inflections of the victim for the murder committed. And really their brother was just caught naturally responding to the conditions at play. And looking the victims family in the eye and saying when in history did murder not happen. With an added weird tone of condescension like these are obviously the appropriate culprits.
Really you can tell who they are attributing “agency” to which really shows their bias. The mainstream media had no “agency” and other forces did. Obviously lots of forces were at play, but I recommend that these two really take a hard look at how they attribute agency relative to themselves, the profession, and others.
Elitists arise from an interesting tension between the agency they attribute to themselves vs others, and how much they try to exert their world view, vs the accountability they have for its flaws.
To speak to the dismissals of the Latin X and other cultural trends hammered down our throats 3 years ago and then toned down recently. They forget that our HR departments and cultural institutions lag a few years behind the “coastal elite news” and just now our smug hr class is using the articles you all wrote in 2020-22 to say “this is established truth” now. And it’s great that y’all have moved on, but it’s kind of like you guys are the mouth chewing up all of this news turning it into “narrative” commenting on it’s complex “mouth-feel” and how interesting it all is, but the rest of us are all the anus dealing with the repercussions of you eating crispy creams for the last 4 years.
But don’t worry you just ate an apple… so we all good.