Why Americans Distrust the News Media and How it Matters December 2010 Forthcoming from Princeton University Press Jonathan McDonald Ladd Assistant Professor Georgetown University www.jonathanmladd.com 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 4 1. Why Is Everyone Mad at the Mainstream Media? 6 2. Political Conflict with the Press in the Pre-Polling Era 18 3. The Emergence of the Institutional News Media in an Era of Decreasing 57 Political Polarization 4. The Institutional News Media in an Era of Political Polarization and Media 92 Fragmentation 5. Sources of Antipathy toward the News Media 151 6. News Media Trust and Political Learning 189 7. News Media Trust and Voting 240 8. The News Media in a Democracy 262 References 298 2 To my parents 3 Acknowledgments I acquired so many debts while pursuing this project that the thanks offered here are surely insufficient. First, I am deeply indebted to Larry Bartels. Larry has provided generous assistance and wise advice from the time we met to the present day. At Princeton, he seemingly always had time to discuss new ideas and read my work. Intellectually, Larry shaped how I look at all social science research. Most importantly, he taught me the importance of steering advanced social scientific tools toward addressing fundamental questions about democracy. At Princeton, I was lucky to be also advised by Doug Arnold, Tali Mendelberg and Marty Gilens. They have been extremely generous with their time, reading drafts and providing insightful suggestions at all stages of the project. I was also very fortunate to receive feedback from many other excellent scholars at Georgetown, Princeton, and across the country. These included Paul Abramson, Chris Achen, Mike Bailey, Adam Berinsky, Shana Gadarian, Amy Gershkoff, Bill Gormley, Doris Graber, Matt Hindman, Greg Huber, Karen Jusko, David Karol, Chris Karpowitz, Paul Kellstedt, Erika King, Dave Lewis, Skip Lupia, Nolan McCarty, Hans Noel, Diana Owen, Markus Prior, John Sides, Steve R. Smith, Clyde Wilcox, John Zaller, seminar participants at George Washington University, Georgetown University, Princeton University, Temple University, University of Delaware, several anonymous reviewers, and especially Stu Jordan and Gabe Lenz. Of course, while the aforementioned should share credit for all positive aspects of this book, I am responsible for all deficiencies. I received excellent research assistance at Georgetown from Holly Boux, Danielle Bush, Amy Cohen, Rebecca Delaney, Tyronda Gibson, Meghan Keneally, Sarah Levey, Amanda Spears and Kristin Thorpe. I received financial support for various portions of this project from 4 Georgetown’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Princeton’s Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, and Princeton’s Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. Paul DiMaggio generously provided data from his reinterviews of 2000 General Social Survey respondents, which I use in Chapter 6. James Chu of Princeton’s Office of Information Technology provided assistance implementing the media trust and learning experiment, which also appears in Chapter 6. I never would have started this project if not for the education I received from Tufts’s Political Science Department, especially Jeff Berry and Jim Glaser. They introduced me to political science and its potential, inspired me to attend graduate school, and helped me get there. Additional special thanks go to Adam Berinsky, who taught my first graduate public opinion and research design classes, employed me as a research assistant, and has continued to provide advice, encouragement and assistance. My parents, Susan Cartmell and Larry Ladd, have always provided the greatest possible support to my academic endeavors. My debt to their passions for politics and intellectual pursuits is obvious. For that and many other reasons, this book is dedicated to them. No person has experienced the day-to-day work of finishing this project as closely as my wife, Nancy. I am grateful for her seemingly endless patience and kindness. As my love and best friend, I am very lucky she chose to journey through life with me. Finally, special thanks go to my daughter Ruth. While she did not directly aid in this book’s creation, she did make the past two years extraordinary. 5 Chapter 1: Why Is Everyone Mad at the Mainstream Media? 6 In the mid-twentieth century, the news media were one of America’s most trusted institutions. The 1956 American National Election Study (ANES) found that 66% of Americans thought newspapers were “fair,” while only 27% said they were unfair. These views were bipartisan, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats viewing newspapers as fair. When the Roper Organization asked a similar question about network news in two 1964 polls, 71% and 61% of the public thought it was fair, while just 12% and 17% thought it was unfair. In 1973, when the General Social Survey (GSS) began regularly measuring confidence in various national institutions, only 15% of respondents reported having “hardly any” confidence in the press. Prominent journalists were among the most respected figures in the country. A famous 1972 poll found that 72% of Americans trusted CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, higher than any other public figure in the survey. In 1976, investigations by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s uncovering the Watergate scandal were dramatized in a movie adaptation of their book, All the President’s Men. In the commercially successful film, the journalists were depicted heroically and played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, two of the era’s most charismatic movie stars.1 In popular culture, journalists were noble defenders of democracy and the public interest. Today, the news media’s place in society has changed. In the 2008 GSS, the portion of Americans expressing “hardly any” confidence in the press had risen to 45%. A 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education poll found that only 10% of Americans had “a great deal” of confidence in the “national news media,” about the same as lawyers, in whom 9% of Americans had “a great deal” of confidence. 1 See West (2001, 64). Details on the polling results reported in the first three paragraphs of this chapter are provided in Chapters 3 and 4. 7 This decline in media trust was accompanied by a fragmentation of the news industry. Once, the media landscape largely consisted of a few national television news networks, local television news and newspapers. The vast majority these journalists were committed to a style of “objective” journalism that rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. As a result, there was little diversity in coverage styles. Media choices have greatly proliferated in the past 40 years. New options include political talk radio, cable news channels, internet news and opinion sites, as well as many entertainment-oriented media options. These choices offer a great variety of news styles, including more partisan and tabloid-oriented approaches. As the media landscape has expanded, institutional (or “mainstream”) media outlets have come under increasing criticism from politicians, activists and pundits. Sometimes these criticisms are transmitted by institutional news sources. Yet they also come through the newer alternative media outlets. As a result, the trustworthiness of more professionalized forms of journalism is under steady assault. Overall, those practicing conventional “objective” journalism are in a much different position than they were a generation ago. They are dramatically less trusted by the public, face harsh and persistent political criticism, and must compete with less conventional news sources as well as many other entertainment options. The Conventional Wisdom It can be easy to see this as a fall from grace. Once, institutional journalists were powerful guardians of the republic, maintaining high standards of political discourse and routing out misbehavior by politicians and other public officials. Now, institutional journalists lack public trust and are swarmed by newer forms of reporting that flout the old standards, potentially leaving the public defenseless against political misbehavior. In this way of thinking, a powerful 8 media establishment free of competition or political attacks is the natural and optimal state of the world, interrupted by strange nefarious deviations in recent decades. These trends should be reversed and journalism returned to its proper place in American politics and society. In an article subtitled “Why is Everyone Mad at the Mainstream Media?” Nicholas Lemann (2005), Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recalls some of his first memories of the media establishment from his childhood in the early 1960s: I remember being sent, as a child, from Louisiana on summer visits to my grandparents in New Jersey. My grandfather, who was a pediatrician in the town of Perth Amboy, would sit in his easy chair on Sundays reading the [New York] Times in a spirit not dissimilar to that of someone taking the sacrament. After finishing one article, he’d begin the next—who was he to decide what, of the material the Times’ editors had chosen to publish, he had the right to skip? Quite often, the aural accompaniment to this exercise was the soothing music of WQXR, the Times’ radio station, which between segments of classical music would occasionally air interviews with Times correspondents and critics—men, I inferred from their calm, distinguished voices, with neat Vandyke beards, their heads wreathed in contemplative clouds of pipe