Restoring Trust in News Will Take More Than a Summit
Reflecting on a Washington answer to a national problem
Last Thursday, I watched a cringy and tone-deaf Semafor event billed as a “National Summit” on “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” Kudos to Semafor for assembling an A-List group of interviewees on an important topic. I joined with an open mind, but as DC is (in)famous for these kinds of events my email and Slack windows remained opened, too.
The event was held at Gallup’s DC offices. If you’re not familiar with the area, it’s in the heart of downtown, and this was a very Washingtonian experience. A lot was said by important people in the most serious and self-aggrandizing tones. But not much of what was said was important, while everyone involved gravely felt like they had a lot to reflect upon afterwards.
Ignoring the Issues
It was virtually a waste of time. Thankfully, that’s how I participated in it: virtually. If you want to see it for yourself, here’s the link.
The discussions did not focus on innovation and they didn’t engender elevated trust either in the mainstream media or its alternatives. Instead, what we got was:
• From Gallup’s CEO Jim Clifton (and, by proxy, the analysts who did the two slides for him), trust in the mass media is historically terrible and that it has been since Watergate. Unasked question: So why are we talking about this now?
• From CNN’s Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson, we learned that he doesn’t trust mass media either and he’d rather have a “questioning audience,” which seemed to me an ostrich-like answer from the cable network in last place.
• From Megyn Kelly, the one person who is doing something truly innovative by betting on herself after leaving Fox News, literally nothing about innovation because Semafor’s Ben Smith didn’t ask her any questions about why she has succeeded.
• At the 56:06 mark, we learned that Fox News Anchor Bret Baier can throw a a sharp elbow. Smith read a quote by “former friend” Chuck Todd charging that Baier is no longer a journalist and just wants to have “teatime with the president.” Baier quickly replied that he had an interview with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer today and that he doesn’t know what Todd is doing (he was fired from Meet the Press and recently left NBC).
It only got worse from there:
• Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, said that their solve for the lack of trust in the media is to defend their journalists. (It’s not working.)
• Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR said they’re totally okay with some stations using their own brand and not NPR’s, which is like you telling your mom that you think the casserole is “nice.”
• Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker telling Ben Smith that she was told off-stage to “hurry up” because people had a “lot to say.” (They really didn’t, though.)
• Finally, the heel arrived, Brendan Carr, Chairman of the FCC. Like the spectrum he oversees, he controlled the interview from the jump and made some news in hinting that he’d be totally okay regulating new media if Congress gave him the authority to do so. I look forward to this Substack getting FCC notices someday.
Semafor’s editor-in-chief, Smith, did little to discuss the main issues of the conference, trust and innovation, so I will:
Trust in Media
The way to rebuild trust with an audience is to connect with them. Old style newsrooms were so well funded that they did not need to think about what might be important or should be important to their readers. This was an entirely editorial decision, not one connected to the wider world.
Over the years, beginning post-Watergate, and now through the Decade of Trump, the big news brands have lost trust because of a lack of reporting. In just the past 10 years, mainstream outlets missed stories on what happened before the Capitol insurrection, before the fall of Afghanistan, and Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline.
Sorry, books about Trump after his first term or an upcoming book from Jake Tapper after he’s out of office are not what we expect. We expect reporting in real-time, not after the fact. The overall impression we’re getting is that they’re holding the good stuff for their books.
Trust needs to be rebuilt upon the news itself. The big brands, network news, cable news, national newspapers, will need to connect you with reporters who are doing great work. I think of Wired magazine’s political team, which is doing amazing work now on DOGE. You don’t need a legacy name to do great reporting.
Innovation in Media
I have faced questions of innovation in my business, where response rates on surveys have dropped, we have shifted to multi-modal ways of connecting with voters. Older and have a landline? We’ll call you. Younger and always on your iPhone, we’ll text you so you can take the interview on the web.
The insight is to meet people where they are. You are overwhelmingly getting this through email, and so we are not going to nuke your iPhone with a notification, unless you want it. News needs to understand that its audience’s consumption habits are shifting and meet them there.
Fewer people are on Twitter/X and are shifting to alternatives. Fewer people are going to websites or spending a half hour watching television news. Pivots to video are silly without context of what audiences want from you.
We don’t want metaphysical innovation in news. We want the news, the actual news, where we want it, when we want it. The evening television newscasts I grew up with made sense when we all gathered around a dinner table to discuss our days and the news of the day. We’re now always in contact with each other so we don’t need a half hour of that.
Instead, simply ask your audience how they want your content. Yes, it means surveys and focus groups or some combination of both.
But all of this requires keeping an open mind, like I did for Semafor and the titans of mainstream media. The problem is their minds are closed and off-topic, and that’s why they’re losing us, and why those of us experimenting with new channels for news, like Substack, are winning.
Michael Cohen, is the author of the book Modern Political Campaigns, president of Cohen Research Group and a 30-year veteran of the polling industry. He writes The Level regularly for 24sight News, analyzing polling and campaign trends with a keen eye and level-headed approach.
How better to advance “trust” in corporate media than an untrustworthy “National Summit” … and what do they see during their ostrich act—Earth Two and an enrobed King Donald I?
Access to the truth and the facts along with adherence to the rule of law are the foundations of democracy. I believe it is the duty of journalism to bring the facts and the truth to the public. Media outlets cannot continue to allow politicians to lie their way through an interview with no follow up from the anchor. I am so sick of sitting on my sofa yelling 'that's not true' while the anchor says nothing except 'thank you for being here.' So to regain the public trust, the media needs to find away to ensure that politicians lies are countered with facts. It might be tedious and it may limit who will go on the show, but watching news where the lie prevails and truth is smothered is a monumental waste of time. Moreover it's dangerous because such journalism makes the liar the winner and the public the loser. So, there needs to be national media broadcast standards that require media outlets to provide a balance of facts in order to qualify for a licence to air content under the umbrella of news or journalism.