Happy Independence: Why News-gathering Matters In An Era Of Low Trust

Happy 250th Independence Day! Our freedom is something to celebrate – however challenged, however diminished in this era of Donald Trump. This administration’s assault on journalism is well documented. Less well examined is the broader picture of how our journalistic institutions are being eroded.

I had a deep conversation with journalist Charles Feldman, who has the podcast “SOS America,” about what the job of journalism is today. We talked about Trump’s obsessive need for media attention; Bari Weiss’s wrongheaded approach to what news consumers need (short answer: fact-based news gathering); the abdication by cable news of covering national news; and the reasons for the lack of trust in media.

Here’s the problem, and a good reminder on the Fourth of July: We don’t have a democracy unless we also have a free press to hold power accountable. But our free press is no longer trusted by a major segment of the electorate. They prefer to learn their news on TikTok. Meanwhile, a culture of lying and distortion by our public officials has become normalized.

The elements driving this tension are not just intimidation by Trump, though that is significant. It’s also the rise of activist journalism that is focused on achieving an agenda rather than seeking the truth. Additionally, we also can no longer trust the billionaires who own major media institutions like The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and CBS News to stand behind the principles of their publications or broadcasts. The billionaire class that bought up these news organizations with a commitment to safeguard our civic life – I’m looking at you, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Siong — instead have chosen to sacrifice journalistic principles in favor of other business interests.

Cable news long ago abandoned trying to cover the landscape of national and international news, leaving us with anchors more focused on the soap opera in Washington D.C. Our democracy is much the poorer for it. As I told Charles: the cable news channels “are very comfortable, like MSN, staying close to Washington, putting the president and his cronies on television. You don’t get anything like a balanced view of what’s happening, from a news perspective, in the country.”

And as journalists are shed from these legacy institutions, they have moved into independent byways like Substack and YouTube channels. Many of those are excellent and important new points of access to independent information. But a lot of them are also driven by a political point of view, whether Joy-Ann Reid or Tucker Carlson. The slide into opinion-based information rather than fact-based news gathering is a trend that is not great for our democracy.

What we need are news organizations that will continue to report the facts. “I don’t think our job in journalism is to hand people a pre-packaged opinion. It’s to lay out the facts and let them decide,” I said on the podcast.

This view is not only at odds with Carlson or Reid, but with CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss who told her staff in January that the organization she runs is looking to set the news agenda and offer up “scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation.” As I noted critically at the time, this doesn’t help us establish a foundation of information that underpins a free society. Weiss said she was interested in setting a news agenda — having an investigative piece on CBSNews.com and YouTube. Featuring it on the evening news that night. Then again on CBS’s morning show. Then a sit-down on “60 Minutes” “and on and on and on. We create the wave and then we ride it,” she said at the time.  

But we actually do need news institutions, larger than a single independent journalist working on Substack (although that’s great), able to gather the facts about the workings of our government and commerce and offer that to readers.

This seems very much out of fashion.  

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a dying breed,” I confessed to Feldman. “TheWrap is very much founded on the principles of news gathering and fact based reporting. That’s how I personally write… I kind of feel like I’m losing that battle. There are fewer and fewer people who are vocal about the foundation of what we do as journalists, which should be gathering facts and presenting them to our readers for the benefit of them having greater understanding and forming their own opinions.

“I’m seeing the trend…. I’m on a shrinking iceberg here.”

Please do listen to the conversation and share your thoughts in comments below. We need to have this debate about the role of media, and commit to the principles that support our cherished freedoms in the United States.

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