Journalism and Media Trust: What Each Position Is Protecting

In 2005, Craigslist was processing somewhere between $50 million and $65 million a year in classified ad revenue that had previously gone to American newspapers. By 2011, classified advertising — which had been the financial backbone of local news for a century — had effectively ceased to exist as a newspaper revenue source. The classified ad didn't move online in a way that newspapers could follow. It moved to a platform that charged nothing and needed nothing from the newsroom that had historically hosted it.

The collapse came in waves. First classifieds. Then display advertising, which followed audience attention to Google and Facebook at prices that newspapers could not survive on. Then the 2008 financial crisis, which accelerated every trend already in motion. By 2023, the United States had lost roughly 2,900 newspapers since 2005 — more than a third of all papers that existed at the beginning of the century. The Pew Research Center's 2024 State of the News Media report found that newspaper newsroom employment had fallen by 57 percent since 2008. Television and radio had shed roughly 30 percent.

At the same time — and this is the part that makes the debate genuinely hard — trust in news media fell sharply across the same period. Gallup's long-running tracking poll showed confidence in newspapers and television news reaching historic lows: 18 and 14 percent respectively by 2023, down from the mid-fifties in the late 1970s. The collapse in trust tracked the collapse in employment, but correlation is not causation. Did people lose trust in the news because the industry shrank? Because the remaining outlets became more partisan? Because audiences became more polarized? Because the news got worse? Because something fundamental changed in the relationship between media and audience? Different camps give very different answers, and those answers lead to very different prescriptions.

What the structural collapse position is protecting

The most analytically developed argument about what went wrong is also the least satisfying emotionally: journalism's funding model was destroyed by platform companies that extracted the advertising revenue it depended on while bearing none of the cost of producing the information that made advertising valuable. This is the position associated with Emily Bell of Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Tim Wu's work on attention and advertising markets, and the advocacy organization Free Press, which has long argued for structural intervention in media markets.

The argument is not complicated but it is often resisted. Local newspapers did not fail because they became bad at journalism. Many of the papers that closed had been producing serviceable, earnest local coverage until the day their owners decided the financial math no longer worked. They failed because Google and Facebook captured the advertising market at scale while keeping the information infrastructure — the reporting that made local search and social engagement meaningful — as an externality. Penny Abernathy's decade of research at the University of North Carolina mapped what this means in concrete terms: entire counties in the rural South, the mountain West, and tribal lands where no newspaper-equivalent has emerged to replace what closed. She called them "news deserts," and the term stuck because it was accurate.

What this position is protecting is the idea that journalism is a public good — something that benefits communities beyond the individuals who consume it — and that public goods cannot be reliably provided by markets operating at the wrong scale. The internet is a national market; democracy is a local practice. City council meetings, school board decisions, local court proceedings, zoning hearings — these are where democratic self-governance actually happens, and they are precisely what the collapsed newsroom no longer covers. Joshua Benton at Harvard's Nieman Lab has documented the measurable consequences: political science research by Meghan Rubado and Jay Jennings found that local newspaper closures are associated with lower voter turnout in mayoral elections; work by Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy found that municipal borrowing costs rise after local newspaper closures because investors lose access to the accountability information they used to price risk.

The structural position leads to structural remedies: public subsidy for local news (as exists in Canada, Scandinavia, and the UK's BBC model), nonprofit status and philanthropic funding, requirements that platform companies contribute to news funding (as Australia's News Media Bargaining Code attempted in 2021), or antitrust action against the advertising duopoly. These are contested politically for obvious reasons — government subsidy of journalism raises genuine independence concerns, and platform companies have resisted most regulatory approaches vigorously.

What this position costs: it is better at diagnosing what destroyed the funding model than at explaining what would restore it. The newspapers that already closed are not coming back. The advertising model that sustained them is not returning. Public subsidy programs face political opposition from the right (government money equals government control) and from parts of the left (existing news organizations do not deserve preservation). The Australian code produced Facebook blocking news links for a week before a deal was struck — a demonstration of platform leverage rather than a governance solution.

What the conservative media critique is protecting

A different set of people look at the same collapse in trust and see a different cause. For them, the collapse of public confidence in mainstream journalism is not a casualty of platform economics — it is a verdict on journalistic practice. The institutions that lost trust lost it by earning the loss. Tim Groseclose's 2011 book Left Turn applied a systematic ideological scoring methodology to news coverage and found that most prestige outlets clustered measurably left of center on the scale he constructed. Mollie Hemingway, Matthew Continetti, and others in the conservative media criticism tradition have argued, in various forms, that the ideological composition of major newsrooms — which are heavily concentrated in a handful of coastal cities and skew toward university-educated professionals who vote Democratic at high rates — produces systematic coverage blind spots that half the country finds condescending or hostile.

This is not primarily an argument about political bias in individual stories, though that accusation is also common. It is an argument about which stories get covered, which framings are treated as default, which sources are considered authoritative, and which concerns are taken seriously as concerns. The audiences that have migrated to Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the sprawling ecosystem of right-leaning digital media are not, on this view, being radicalized or misinformed — they are finding coverage that treats their experiences and concerns as legitimate objects of attention rather than as problems to be explained.

What this position is protecting is the epistemic standing of a large portion of the American public who have concluded that the institutions claiming to speak for "the news" do not actually represent a neutral account of reality. The Fox News audience is not stupid or uniquely credulous. They are applying the same audience skepticism that media critics have long advocated — the recognition that every institution has a perspective — and they have concluded that Fox's perspective is more aligned with their own than the alternative. Whether that conclusion is correct or mistaken is a separate question from whether it is coherent.

What this position costs: the market response to perceived mainstream liberal bias produced partisan media ecosystems with their own structural problems. Research by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts in Network Propaganda (2018) found substantial asymmetry in how misinformation circulates in left and right media ecosystems — the right-wing media network had developed what they called a "propaganda feedback loop" in which outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars influenced mainstream conservative coverage in ways that had no clear equivalent on the left. This finding is contested, and the line between partisan perspective and factual misinformation is not always clear, but the conservative media critique that produced this ecosystem has difficulty accounting for outlets that claim to correct liberal bias while circulating demonstrably false information.

What the press reform position is protecting

A third camp finds both of the above arguments inadequate. Jay Rosen of NYU, whose PressThink blog has been the most sustained critical engagement with journalistic practice from inside the liberal press ecosystem, argues that the problems with mainstream journalism are not primarily about political bias — they are about craft conventions that damage democratic epistemics regardless of the ideological leanings of individual journalists.

The specific target of this critique is a cluster of practices that trade under the brand of "objectivity" but function as something else: stenographic reporting that quotes official sources without context, "both-sidesism" that presents contested empirical claims as if all sides had equal evidentiary standing, access journalism that softens accountability coverage to preserve relationships with powerful sources, and a Washington-centric Overton window that defines the range of legitimate policy as whatever political elites are currently considering. These practices are not liberal or conservative in a simple sense — they are structurally conservative in that they privilege the perspectives of existing institutional power. A major newspaper practicing "objectivity" will reliably give more weight to a senator's press release than to a community organizer's documented experience, regardless of which one is closer to the truth.

Rosen's proposed alternative is what he calls "the view from somewhere" — a transparent acknowledgment of perspective and values rather than a claim to a God's-eye neutrality that no institution actually has. Dean Baker, the economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has applied a version of this critique specifically to economic coverage, arguing that mainstream outlets systematically present deficit spending as a crisis and full employment as an afterthought in ways that reflect the interests of their ownership class rather than neutral economic analysis.

What this position is protecting is a more substantively democratic journalism — one that allocates coverage and credibility on the basis of documented impact rather than institutional access. It is protecting the communities and concerns that the access-journalism model systematically undercovers: workers rather than executives, tenants rather than landlords, the insured rather than the insurance industry. The Columbia Journalism Review and the Nieman Journalism Lab have published variations of this critique for decades; it gained new urgency when mainstream outlets failed to predict the 2016 election, a failure that critics in this tradition attributed precisely to the access and access-adjacent biases the critique identified.

What this position costs: the "view from somewhere" critique is more persuasive as a diagnosis than as a guide to practice. Transparency about perspective is genuinely valuable; it is less clear that it solves the underlying problem of producing reliable information about contested reality. The conservative media critics and the press reform critics agree that mainstream journalism has a perspective problem but prescribe opposite responses — more explicit advocacy or less. And the outlets that have moved toward more transparent values-driven journalism (MSNBC on the left, many digital outlets across the spectrum) have not obviously produced better-informed audiences.

What the local news preservationist position is protecting

A fourth camp argues that the entire debate about media trust — which is mostly a debate about national prestige outlets — is a category error. The real crisis is not happening at the New York Times or Fox News. It is happening in the counties, cities, and neighborhoods where no paper-equivalent has emerged to replace the one that closed.

The UNC News Deserts project, which Penny Abernathy led and which has continued under other researchers, has documented the geography of collapse: more than 200 counties in the United States now have no local news outlet of any kind — no newspaper, no digital news site, no local TV or radio doing original accountability reporting. Another 1,500 counties have only one news outlet, and that outlet typically serves a conservative rural population that national media debate treats as an afterthought. The people in these counties are not better served by a better-resourced Washington Post or a reformed Fox News. They are not served by national media at all except when something catastrophic happens in their community.

This position aligns with the political science research on what local news actually does for democracy. Meghan Rubado and Jay Jennings' work on municipal elections found significant negative effects of local newspaper closures on voter turnout. Research by Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido on the New Jersey Trentonian's closure found measurable increases in municipal government spending — the kind of fiscal looseness that happens when nobody is watching. The Rebuild Local News initiative, launched in 2020 and supported by journalism foundations, has argued that the relevant policy intervention is not platform regulation or national media standards — it is direct support for local newsrooms through subsidies, tax credits for local news employment, and investment in nonprofit local news organizations.

What this position is protecting is something more concrete than epistemic health or audience trust: it is democratic accountability at the scale where most power is actually exercised. Most Americans interact with government through their school district, their city hall, their county health department — not through federal agencies or the national political system that dominates media coverage. The local news preservationist position insists that the loss of accountability journalism at this scale is a democratic emergency that cannot be addressed by improvements to national media, however welcome those would be.

What this position costs: local news subsidy faces the same independence concerns as all journalism subsidy. And the local news organizations being preserved are not always neutral: many small-town papers reflect the ownership and ideological disposition of the communities they serve, which can mean coverage that reinforces local power rather than challenging it. The category of "local news" does real work, but it can obscure significant variation in what that news actually does.

What the new models position is protecting

A fifth camp is less interested in diagnosing what went wrong than in building what comes next. The argument associated with Substack's founders, with digital publishers like The Information, with city-focused startups like The Oaklandside and Block Club Chicago, and with business analysts like Ken Doctor (who has tracked newspaper economics closely at his Newsonomics newsletter) is that journalism is not dying — legacy newspapers are dying. The newspaper was a bundle: classified ads, comics, sports scores, coupons, and news all sold together at a price that cross-subsidized the public affairs reporting that nobody would pay for alone. The internet unbundled this. The individual components found their own markets. What remains is the part that never had a clear market to begin with.

On this view, the right response is not to subsidize legacy structures or reform legacy practices but to build new structures that are financially viable at smaller scale. The Atlantic under Laurene Powell Jobs' ownership rebuilt around a subscription model and returned to financial stability. The Texas Tribune pioneered a nonprofit model for state-level investigative journalism that has spawned dozens of imitators. Axios built a profitable franchise model for local news coverage in the largest metro markets. Block Club Chicago covers one city and has found a reader-supported base sufficient to sustain a staff of reporters who cover only that city.

What this position is protecting is journalism as a craft that can survive the collapse of the 20th-century business model by finding 21st-century alternatives. It is protecting the optimistic proposition that readers will pay for quality journalism if it is specific enough to be irreplaceable and credible enough to be trusted — that the failure of advertising-supported mass-market journalism does not mean journalism itself has no market.

What this position costs: the new models work at scale, and at geography. Substack works for writers with national audiences on topics national audiences care about. The Atlantic works for a educated subscriber class that can afford and cares to read long-form. The Texas Tribune works because Texas politics is consequential enough to attract both readers and funders. These models do not obviously scale to Pueblo, Colorado, or Meridian, Mississippi. The communities most harmed by the collapse of local news are precisely the communities where subscription models and philanthropic fundraising have the least traction. The new-models optimism, while real, is geographically selective in ways that track existing inequality.

Where the tensions actually live

The journalism debate has several structural features that make it unusually resistant to resolution.

The first is that trust in news is now partially a political identity marker. Research by Matthew Levendusky and Neil Malhotra and others has documented that distrust in mainstream media is partly downstream of partisan identity — Republicans distrust mainstream news more than Democrats do, and this gap has widened over time in ways that track political polarization rather than anything specific that news organizations did. This does not mean that every critique of news organizations is mere partisanship — some critiques are well-founded — but it means that trust surveys cannot distinguish between "the audience learned that journalism has problems" and "the audience was told by partisan actors that journalism is the enemy." These are different diagnoses with very different implications.

The second is the measurement problem. We can measure employment and outlet closures. We can measure trust surveys. We can measure some downstream effects of news deserts (turnout, municipal borrowing costs). What we cannot easily measure is the quality of public understanding — whether people who consume more news are better-informed about the things that matter for their participation in democratic life. The "information environment" is a construct; what flows through it and what it produces in citizens is hard to assess. Media effects research has produced inconsistent results for decades, and the emergence of social media has complicated it further.

The third is a genuinely contested normative question about what journalism is for. If journalism is primarily for informing citizens so they can participate in self-governance, then local accountability coverage is the most important kind and national prestige journalism is relatively peripheral. If journalism is primarily for holding power accountable, then investigative journalism (wherever it appears) matters most and the question is how to fund it sustainably. If journalism is primarily for making sense of a complex world, then the interpretive and analytical work that prestige outlets do is central. These are not the same function, and different diagnoses of journalism's crisis prioritize different ones.