Jelani Cobb, Ritu Kapur and Stephen Ansolabehere during the panel discussion moderated by our Acting Director, Mitali Mukherjee. | John Cairns
“Our problem is not simply that the public does not trust us, it’s that they do trust other dishonest brokers. We are not just witnessing a crisis of credibility, we are experiencing a crisis of credulity as well,” said Dr Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School in this year’s Reuters Memorial Lecture. His lecture reflected on the factors affecting these crises, from news organisations’ capitulation to pressures from Donald Trump’s administration, to the existential challenges faced by the most trusted publications: local newspapers.
Following the lecture, Cobb joined a panel chaired by our Acting Director, Mitali Mukherjee, to discuss this topic further. Also on the panel were Stephen Ansolabehere, the Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University, and Ritu Kapur, co-founder and managing director of Indian digital outlet The Quint.
A significant portion of the discussion focused on the challenges faced by the American press in President Trump’s second term. In his lecture, Cobb mentioned the decision to exclude the Associated Press from White House press briefings after it refused to adopt the name ‘Gulf of America’ against its own guidelines.
He also touched on events in his own institution, Columbia University, which is currently in the headlines after President Trump announced he would freeze $400 million in federal grants to the university, and after a member of its community was held by federal agents. Both these circumstances are connected to the pro-Palestine protests and encampments organised by students at Columbia last year.
Cobb said that he sees an ‘autocratic impulse’ developing in the US today, but he stressed that this isn’t entirely new and he used a very graphic analogy.
“Say you were talking about a family,” he said. “They have produced generation after generation of great athletes, one was a champion in track and field, and one was a great swimmer. And they go through the entire lineage, but they don't talk about the fact that there's also this long history of heart disease where people die at 40, and both of those things can be true in your family history. In the United States, we've talked about the athletic side of it – being an older constitutional democracy. We haven't talked about the length of the anti-democratic tradition that's informing the moment we're in right now.”
Ansolabehere said that the aggressive pace of Trump’s executive orders can be explained by the likelihood that he will be reined in by courts and by his own party, which only has a very slim majority in the US House of Representatives.
“There's a deeper, hidden, more difficult story unfolding for those of us who are watching some of the details, and that's the insidious nature of what is being done,” he added, pointing to the editing or taking down of government websites and other resources related to topics such as climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Our Acting Director Mitali Mukherjee highlighted that, in the chaos of announcements that has ensued since Trump’s inauguration, longer-running issues that were crucial during the election campaign, such as inflation, seem to have been neglected in news coverage.
Cobb agreed that the media overall seems to have moved away from some of those key issues. “Someone described the press as behaving like a cat when someone has a laser pointer. And so we just follow all these things all over the place, as opposed to staying with one thing,” he said.
Ritu Kapur reminded everyone that what’s happening in the US is not unprecedented, and that similar steps were taken by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “The difference that I see is the backing of democratic institutions. I still hold out hope in the US, because in India, if you're a journalist or a journalistic organisation that is under attack from the powers that be, the courts are often not a recourse,” she said.
Ansolabehere believes that the US Supreme Court is likely to protect free speech and uphold the First Amendment, and that both sides of the political spectrum in the US generally agree on the importance of this right.
As Cobb discussed in his lecture, declining trust in news presents a significant challenge for the news industry. Mukherjee pointed to data from our Digital News Report 2024 data, with 32% of people surveyed in the US trusting most news most of the time. This places the country in the bottom half of the 47 markets included. Across all markets, we also found that younger people, those with lower levels of education and those with lower income are less likely to trust the news.
“Increasingly, this trust is reflective of a large section of audiences that feels quite disengaged and frankly, not reflected in the news,” Mukherjee said.
“News avoidance is a natural byproduct of the fact that we are not giving people the news that they want and pretty much consistently always wanted,” Cobb said, pointing to discrepancies between what journalists think is important to focus on and what audiences actually want to read. “We tend to take ourselves too seriously, we think that our audience wants hard-hitting investigative report after hard-hitting investigative report, and no, they want to know what Taylor Swift wore in her last concert,” he said.
Cobb suggested news organisations should meet audiences where they are, which is increasingly in the realm of social media and podcasts.
“We have a lot to learn [from influencers], because they are people who are adept at building an audience. Granted, some of the things they do we are ethically prohibited from doing, which is a disadvantage. But some of it is savvy marketing,” Cobb said. One of the potential learnings is that you can hold an audience’s attention for a long time, as Joe Rogan does in his popular podcast, in which he interviews guests often for a couple of hours at a time.
Kapur agreed: “Let's try and understand why and how an influencer or a content creator is able to capture the mind of the audience in a way that we're not. What are some of the tricks that we need to borrow from them?”
News audiences migrating to social media also poses problems for the quality and trustworthiness of the information they are consuming, Ansolabehere said, pointing out the lack of clarity about sourcing in some of those spaces.
However, Kapur explained that some influencers played a relevant role during the latest Indian election. “Something which made a dent in the outcome of the elections in India is that a lot of the influencers, they actually picked up solid journalism done by journalists, and they amplified it,” she said.
Being a journalist today is tough, amid economic instability and political headwinds. But there are ways reporters can address these challenges, particularly if they work together, Kapur said. This is something she’s seen among fact-checkers as sources of funding dry up and social platforms turn away from them.
Ansolabehere is seeing similar attitudes within academia and the social sciences. “There is an increased focus and interest in people applying their skills and asking themselves: What can I do to help the world? What can I do to help journalism or public policy making or decision making?” he says.
Although good journalism faces challenges and threats and will likely have to adapt to confront a shifting information environment, it remains useful to audiences and essential for a healthy democracy.
“This is an honorable profession,” Cobb said. “The work that we do is valuable. People depend on us, even people who distrust us. They still depend on us in ways that they may not have even grappled with yet.”
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