The media is in trouble. Its traditional business model has all but collapsed, its journalism standards are in freefall. Americans have noticed. Voters in the United States express historically high levels of mistrust in the press. Faith in our nation’s political system is disintegrating at the same time. Belief in government has never been lower. These two trends — interrelated, mutually reinforcing — have been years in the making. Together, they constitute a crisis in confidence in two institutions essential to self-government.
First, the political dimension. As the Cold War ended, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared that it was important to remember “what politics in a democracy is all about.” Accruing power is certainly part of the equation, he noted. In the age of mass communications, so is packaging marketable candidates and messages. “But in a democracy politics is about something more than the struggle for power or the manipulation of image,” Schlesinger wrote. “It is above all about the search for remedy.”
Picking up on this theme ahead of the 1992 presidential election, political writer E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote a scathing review of the existing two-party system. His takedown came in the form of a book, “Why Americans Hate Politics,” which posited that U.S. voters were alienated by the “false choices” presented by increasingly ideological activists and cynical party professionals. Dionne wrote that Republicans and Democrats had learned to frame political campaigns as battles over “issues” instead of “problems,” a crucial distinction.
Running to fix problems, Dionne noted, suggests that after elections are over, the remedies proposed during the campaign can be enacted. Instead, modern campaigns are built around cultural wedge “issues” designed to defy solutions. The intent isn’t to solve problems, it’s to divide Americans — and entrench those divisions for future elections. Moreover, the idea that remedies are the endgame implies some level of compromise, even if the losing side has to concede more than the winning side. This is possible only in an environment of cooperation.
In the ensuing three decades, every pathology that troubled political observers has worsened.
For starters, the entire enterprise depends on a losing candidate or party accepting the results of adverse election outcomes. Yet powerful elements in both of America’s two major political parties routinely defy that prerequisite. Donald Trump has taken the lion’s share of the blame for his performance in the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath. This is justified. It wasn’t only Trump’s incendiary remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, that fueled the riot at the U.S. Capitol. For months — before the votes were counted — Trump claimed without citing any evidence that he was being victimized by massive vote fraud. Millions of Americans believed him, and believe him still, notwithstanding his criminal indictments. His wild assertions are casting a shadow over the 2024 presidential election as well.
But U.S. politics has been building to this point for years, often with Democrats setting the example.
Race to the Bottom
In 2000, after losing in the Supreme Court, thus ending the closest presidential election in U.S. history, Vice President Al Gore delivered a Lincolnesque concession speech remarkable for its grace and eloquence. “Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road," Gore said of George W. Bush. “Certainly, neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came. And now it has ended, resolved as it must be resolved — through the honored institutions of our democracy.”
As vice president, it was Al Gore who stood in the well of the House and certified the vote that put Bush in the White House. It was his sworn and patriotic duty, which he executed with class — just as Mike Pence would do two decades later.
But their example hasn’t been universally followed. Rep. John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, boycotted George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, as did several other House progressives who said repeatedly that they didn’t consider Bush a legitimate president. Jesse Jackson and members of the Congressional Black Caucus spread baseless rumors about African American voters being turned away from the polls at the point of a gun. In the House chamber a dozen progressives tried to block the awarding of Florida’s electoral votes, just as pro-Trump members would do 20 years later regarding the tallies in other states.
And the wacky 2020 fabrications by Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s disreputable legal team about hacked voting machines? Similar talk was prevalent on the left after Bush’s 2004 victory over John Kerry. To this day, a cadre of progressives claim that John Kerry carried Ohio that year and should have been installed in the Oval Office.
In 2016, in answer to a question from debate moderator Chris Wallace, Trump refused to say whether he’d concede if he lost the election. Hillary Clinton promptly pronounced Trump’s answer “horrifying.” She was right and her alarm would prove prophetic. But as events unfolded, this turned out to be a glass house issue: Hillary Clinton herself wrote the script Trump is reading from today. Despite her formal concession speech, Mrs. Clinton spent the next four years loudly claiming that Trump wasn’t really elected. She was hardly alone. Impeachment talk began before Trump was inaugurated, while liberals staged a protest march against him the following day in which one prominent speaker fantasized aloud about torching the White House.
Meanwhile, many of the Democrats and donors who expressed the most vitriol toward Trump’s election-denying “Big Lie” themselves campaigned last year for Georgia gubernatorial Democrat Stacey Abrams — who has yet to concede her 2018 loss to Gov. Brian Kemp.
This is one reason 21st century Americans hate politics. It’s more than just the stench of situational ethics. Leaders in the two major parties don’t show the level of sportsmanship expected of 9-year-old Little Leaguers.
Hillary Clinton’s husband was perhaps the last presidential candidate to win office on the strength of specific problem-solving ideas, and many of his remedies became national policy. Yet, Bill Clinton simultaneously ran on “wedge” issues, continued raising political money almost nonstop after winning, and is credited with ushering in the era of “the permanent campaign.” The results of that endless cycle of electioneering are in, and they are not attractive. E.J. Dionne and other reform-minded observers were prescient.
Impeachment proceedings — an emergency escape hatch written into the Constitution and employed twice in the nation’s first two centuries — are now a feature of the system, not a bug. The process was used against President Clinton in 1998 and twice against President Trump — and may yet be wielded against President Biden. On Capitol Hill, Congress no longer pretends to pass budgets through regular order. Judicial confirmation hearings have become circuses complete with sanctioned hecklers and a level of character assassination that would make Joseph McCarthy blush. The most rash and unwise members of the House attract disproportionate media attention thanks in large part to social media. Inside the chamber, the most superficial members wield disproportionate power, partly because of an unofficial “rule” named after a convicted child molester.
This dysfunction is not lost on the electorate. Today, only two in 10 Americans trust the government in Washington “to do what is right.” In 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency and on the eve of George W. Bush’s tenure in the White House, confidence in the federal government was twice as high as it is now.
But this essay and the series it inaugurates, The 1735 Project, is not about the failings of the two dominant political parties. Rather, it will focus on the media’s role in the degradation of U.S. politics and America’s national discourse. This endeavor, which will consist of numerous reported essays, is about the abdication of a responsibility that the press willingly — often courageously — shouldered throughout the 20th century.
This duty, and the roadmap for fulfilling it, was memorably described at the end of the 19th century by an entrepreneurial Tennessean named Adolph Ochs. At age 19, he assumed control of the Chattanooga Times, where he pioneered a relatively new form of journalism that distinguished between news and opinion — and reported the news straight. Ochs liked to describe his newspaper as “clean, dignified, and trustworthy.”
In 1896, when he was 38, Ochs purchased the New York Times with $75,000 in borrowed money (about $2.7 million in today’s dollars). He announced his vision of the newspaper the following day in the Times’ own pages: Ochs vowed to strive “to give the news honestly, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest involved.”
With that simple declaration, the press in America attained a critical milestone, in the same city where a Colonial-era printer named John Peter Zenger and his lawyer put the question of a free press to a jury of their peers in 1735 — and freedom won.
The example of Zenger and his allies is the inspiration behind this series. Forty years before the Minutemen stood against British regulars in Concord and Lexington, the brave stand taken by the printer of The New York Weekly Journal signaled the early stirrings of desire, among those living on these shores, for freedom. And more than a century after the First Amendment was enshrined into the Constitution, Adolph Ochs heralded the arrival of a new and better way to cover politics and government. Without fear or favor. Without regard to how it affects the outcome of elections, issues, or the exigencies of partisan politics.
To put it plainly, however, Ochs’ principles no longer guide the Times or most legacy U.S. media organizations whether they are print, broadcast, or online outlets. Most of the Fourth Estate has abandoned its historical pursuit of nonpartisanship. While grasping for new sources of revenue, the press is adopting new codes of journalistic ethics. Some traditional outlets are honest about this, at least to a point. Some are not. Nonetheless, it’s obvious to tens of millions of Americans that the legacy media take sides while covering politics and social issues.
Critics of traditional journalism say the old model favored elites and the status quo, while disfavoring women, minorities, and LGBT people — and generally gave short shrift to the demographic richness of America. Even some editors who occupied the top echelons in the legacy media now say that journalism needs to move “beyond objectivity.” Other journalists blame Donald Trump.
The pitfalls of agenda-driven or narrative-based approaches will be explored in future essays of The 1735 Project. As for Trump, it’s undeniably true that he presents a singular challenge for fact-based journalists. It’s also true that what’s happening in the media didn’t start in 2015 when he entered the scene.
Does relinquishing the traditional pursuit of objective news coverage constitute a dereliction of duty prompted by ideological bias and partisanship? Or is it the inevitable result of the technological revolution that ushered in the Digital Information Age, which put the entire content-creating media world under stress? It’s not an academic question. What’s at stake here is nothing short of Americans’ ability to find nonpartisan information and to engage in the honest and free exchange of ideas without fear of censorship or retribution — necessities in any democracy.
Partisanship Gap
Faith in the media cratered at precisely the same time Americans were souring on politics. A generation ago, majorities of Americans had “a great deal of trust” or a “fair amount of trust” in the mass media. The ground began to shift at the dawn of the 21st century and reached its nadir during the gutter politics that embodied the 2016 presidential election.
Today, according to Gallup, only 7% of American adults have a “great deal” of trust and confidence in the media and only 27% say they have “a fair amount.” That number is offset by a corresponding number of Americans (28%) who say they do not have very much confidence in the press. But the 7% of those with great faith in the media are dwarfed by the 38% of Americans who answer “none at all” when asked whether they believe newspapers, television, and radio are giving them the news straight.
“Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined,” Gallup pointed out.
In one sense, the perceived failings of national politics and the media are consistent with a larger trend, one taking place around the globe: the generalized decline in the respect accorded an array of traditional institutions, including the military and organized religion. This is undoubtedly a factor in attitudes toward the media. It is also a peril not easy to counteract.
“Despite the political polarization, both sides feel like they’re losing,” Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight. “And populaces and countries that are pessimistic about the future often end up doing really bad things.”
Yet here’s what is unique, and most troubling, about the decline of trust in the U.S. media: In a nation divided nearly evenly between citizens who vote for Democrats and those who voted Republican, the mistrust is not evenly distributed. Not nearly. The erosion has happened on only one side of the political spectrum. About 70% of Democrats still trust the news media, a figure that hasn’t changed appreciably since the Nixon presidency. Trust among independents has plummeted to 27% and among Republicans it has fallen off the cliff: Only 14% of Republicans say they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media.
“There has been a consistent double-digit gap in trust between Democrats and Republicans since 2001,” notes Gallup, “and that gap has ranged from 54 to 63 percentage points since 2017.”
Are these perceptions warranted? If so, what caused them? And what, to use Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase, is the remedy?
Those are the questions RCP’s 1735 Project will seek to answer. On a summer day 288 years ago, John Peter Zenger was acquitted of criminal libel by a New York jury of his peers. His sensational trial helped give rise to the idea of freedom of the press on this continent, and around the world. Its lessons are relevant once again.
