Pew Research Center’s latest study, “How Americans View Journalists in the Digital Age,” contains a mixed bag. First, the good news: 59% of adults say they consider the profession very or extremely “important” to society, while citing honesty, intelligence and authenticity as qualities they most prize in reporting.
Except like a lot of surveys, what people say often contradicts what they do — at least when it comes to consuming news. There’s a gap between what news consumers say they want and what they actually seek out in their news sources. Simply put, some of those Americans who emphasized honesty (93%), intelligence (89%) and authenticity (82%) as key factors they want from journalism, perhaps giving the answer they thought was expected.
Honesty, moreover, now means different things to different people, with Donald Trump and his supporters tossing around the word “dishonest” at the press on a regular basis, while his administration lies about crime statistics, polling numbers and health issues, and seeks to stop releasing jobs data when he doesn’t like the results.
Trump has also endeavored to flood the White House press pool with sycophants, which were on full display this week during his meeting with European leaders and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, prompting one veteran correspondent to grumble to CNN about the fawning questions lobbed at Trump, calling them “embarrassing.”
Trump and his surrogates, meanwhile, hammer the press for anything perceived as less than worshipful reporting. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt unloaded on reporters Tuesday for their coverage of Trump’s attempts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, saying from the podium, “Many outlets in this room continue to try to actively undermine the president and sabotage the efforts toward peace.”
Like other institutions, the media has exhibited at best an uneven track record in weathering those relentless assaults, which have been abetted by officials like Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, who appears to place serving Trump’s needs above all else.
In the small-victories department, for those operating on the brink of despair, the Pew results didn’t completely add to the darkening mood.
The notion that three in five respondents would embrace the importance of journalism feels significant, especially given all the griping about the media across the partisan divide. Clear majorities also cited the importance of accuracy and correcting false information from public figures, though with marked gaps between Democrats and Republicans on the latter.
Still, even for glass-half-full types, it’s hard not to focus on the negative. Half of the Americans polled said they believe journalists are losing influence, which is undoubtedly true. In addition, a much higher percentage of young adults consider “new media” — described as everything from podcasts to newsletters to people who post about the news on social media — as legitimate alternatives for news and information, which doesn’t bode well for traditional practitioners who have already lost considerable ground to those voices.
Those operating outside the constraints of journalism also help fuel narratives that can be at odds with facts, while providing immediacy and visceral qualities that grab people’s attention and create hard-to-shake perceptions.
As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie posted on Bluesky regarding Trump dispatching troops to major cities under the guise of addressing rampant crime, declines in crime rates are generally not reported on — nothing sexy there — while “any instance of violence is given sensational coverage, so that the perception is of growing crime even when American cities are safer than ever.”
If people don’t feel safer, in other words, the numbers/facts don’t matter — not when there’s another video of someone getting mugged, posted somewhere, every few minutes.
Not surprisingly, Pew’s question about whether journalists are “important” reflected sharp partisan and educational splits, with just over two-thirds of college graduates saying journalists are “extremely or very” important, compared to 51% of those with a high school diploma or less. The same held true for bias and honesty, with roughly three-quarters and half of self-identified Republicans saying journalists are biased and dishonest, respectively, compared to 45% and 19% of Democrats.
How do journalists combat this? Is just being honest, intelligent and authentic enough when so many people are predisposed to think you’re not, while gravitating toward networks, websites and personalities that echo those assumptions? And does playing Whac-a-Mole with falsehoods, trying to disprove them, accomplish anything beyond preaching to the choir?
“In some ways,” the study’s authors noted, “Americans’ ideas about journalists are still tied to what the news industry looked like in the 20th century.”
Trump is using an old playbook in places, from invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a relic from the 1790s — to his fondness for tariffs, which have prompted comparisons to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which, not incidentally, exacerbated the Great Depression.
When it comes to media, though, surviving Trump 2.0 is going to require 21st-century solutions, and as the Pew study indicates, seven months into his term, there’s still no clear game plan for that.