[September 18, 2016] I remember as a little boy my grandmother recounting stories of her parents and their memories of the “yellow journalism” of days long ago. Her oft repeated lesson to me – taught to her by her parents – was to never believe anything you read in the newspaper or hear on the radio (later TV). Trust in media was very low. Earlier this week, a new Gallup poll found that the American public’s trust in the media has fallen to its lowest level since they began asking about it in 1972.1
Unlike Pinocchio in the Walt Disney classic2 by the same name, whose nose grew whenever he told a lie, today’s media is far more sophisticated; knowledgeable of human emotions and technologically advanced to be so obvious. The vast majority of Americans believe the media is no longer objective in their coverage of everyday events, partisan in their politics, and lie, distort the truth, and are far too belligerent to be credible and trustworthy.
This is not just unfortunate; it’s a tragedy in the making. The purpose of the media is of the highest ethic – to inform the public. Democracy is based on freedom of the press and their mission to inform citizens about how their government works, world events, and newsworthy local issues … and to do so in an objective manner. But the press, in its partisan acts, has self-imposed upon itself a gag that prevents it from covering issues that doesn’t fit its political ideology.
The decline of leadership of the media has been discussed for more than a century so this is not new. What is new is that the distrust of the media is so deep that we can see the effect of the yellow journalism of yesteryear being comparable to today’s journalistic malpractice. Sadly, the media’s leadership has either not recognized the problem or believes they are exempt from the basic rules of society. Either way, that is where the problem originates and propagates.
Is leadership the answer? Yes, but leadership is also the problem. Whether from failure to pull new blood from leaders outside the media’s political ideology or from a head-in-the-sand mentality, things can only get worse. The effect will be that distrust of the media and its leadership will continue for generations into the future even when it self-corrects its problem.
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- http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx
- The Walt Disney animated movie Pinocchio (1940) was based on Italian writer Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio