I get the impression that the moment I identify myself as a journalist or reporter to a person, their moods shift from friendly to guarded or openly hostile, like I’m a potential threat or enemy in an open war. Like it or not, it seems like Trump was speaking for many Americans when he said he considered the press the enemy of the people.
Anecdotally, I’ve had some coworkers tell me they avoid describing themselves to people with the word “journalist” to avoid the negative associations that people have with it, preferring to call themselves “writers” and such.
You’ll see people bemoaning the loss of public trust in the media, but really, it’s a decline in trust in general. But particularly in institutions and professionals. I think that, as Sean Illing put it in a Vox podcast a couple years ago, “Americans don’t trust experts” anymore.
Perhaps for good reason: most financial experts didn’t forecast the 2008 financial crisis; political pollsters predicted Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016; mistakes in the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response cost hundred of thousands of lives, according to Scientific American in 2021; and the Ukraine War was expected to end in just a few weeks. Not exactly small mistakes.
So, if you have a friend or family member who says they don’t trust the news, firstly, I encourage them to remember that “the news” covers a lot of people under its wide umbrella.
I can’t speak for people in the big news companies, but in my time at three local journalism publications, I can say that all of them work in the media because they live in the area and care about what’s going on.
I recently attended a Northern Michigan journalists training session that briefly discussed self-proclaimed “citizen journalists” – non-experts – who are active locally and teaching themselves how to exercise the tools of the trade like filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
I’ve seen these citizen journalists locally myself. While they lack institutional training, I tend to think they’re animated by the same motivations as us – a desire to support their communities and keep politicians, local and national, honest.
And if that friend or family member is open to the idea of local journalists being engaged citizens like them, you’d do us a big favor to tell them that if a reporter ever tries to talk to them, it isn’t supposed to be a pop quiz where they need to worry about being caught in a contradiction like a murderer being interviewed by Detective Columbo.
For my part, I want to work with people to understand things in my community better, rather than trap them with “gotcha” questions. Ultimately, I think we’re all on the same side here.
