“any honest assessment would find today’s newspapers more timely and accurate, fairer, and often better-written than the newspapers of 1979.”
…
“Citing a near-universal decline in institutional confidence isn’t an attempt to offer an excuse for newspapers. But it illustrates the pervasiveness of public colic over American life and society, and suggests the institutions might not have changed as much as the perceptions of them have. The best explanation for the uniform drops might be that we’re living in an age of heightened criticism and scrutiny that leaves no faults or blemishes unnoticed compared to earlier eras.”
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“Another possible reason the press might have lost confidence: Reporting has not just become more critical in the past 40 years, but it’s also started covering topics it left largely untouched in earlier times. As Matthew Pressman wrote in his 2018 book, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News, as recently as the early 1960s, newspapers largely ignored matters of race, sex, class and inequity, topics that can make some readers squirm. There weren’t many stories about gender or trans issues in 1979. Other sacred cows, like organized religion, get much more scrutiny today than they did yesterday.”
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“Yet does the public really have such a low opinion of newspapers? Gallup’s wording of its question is pretty vague. It didn’t ask respondents to rate the specific newspapers they read but to express their levels of confidence in the newspaper as an institution. They might have gotten a more positive answer if they had asked people how they feel about the daily newspaper they actually read. When the Pew Research Center asked this question in 2005, they found that 80 percent of Americans give favorable ratings to their daily. Local TV news, cable news and network TV news are rated only slightly worse. Granted, that’s data from a 17-year-old survey, but it shows that asking a slightly different question about the press can produce a startlingly different answer.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/20/gallup-polls-wrong-trust-media-00046654