Letter From the Publisher: the Crisis in Trust and How To Save American Journalism

Dear Friends, As I was preparing to write my third annual letter as publisher of The New York Sun, I came across some footage of Semafor’s “national summit” on “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” The parley included a constellation of news industry leaders, from Joe Kahn, executive editor of the New York Times, to Emma Tucker of the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Maher of NPR, and Mark Thompson of CNN, among others.A variety of creative suggestions were put forth. More editors to provide a “final eye” on content and “categorizing everything that we do,” was the idea logged by NPR’s Maher. Brett Baier of Fox News prescribes “taking the emotion out of it.” CNN’s Thompson both underplayed concerns about declining trust and asserted that he’d actually rather not have a “compliant audience.” The Knight Foundation urges “a renaissance of local news.” Mr. Kahn of the Times is resigned to it taking 40 or 50 years to regain the confidence of the public.On the same day, as if to underscore the futility of the whole conversation, Gallup published its latest numbers on trust in the media. The pollster announced that today “trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades.” Gallup finds that 33 percent of our fellow citizens don’t trust the press “very much” and 36 percent say they have no trust in the press “at all.” In sum, nearly 70 percent of those polled don’t hold the press in high regard. The numbers are trending further downwards, particularly among young people. The sharpest demographic decline of recent years is among young Democrats. Trust is at just 31 percent for those between 18 and 29. They’re now edging closer to Republicans of the same cohort, only 20 percent of whom have a “great deal/fair amount” of trust. So what’s The New York Sun’s contribution to curing this epidemic of distrust plaguing our industry? It’s relatively simple: The last thing needed is “innovation.” The clue is in the Gallup numbers themselves. They show that trust in the press peaked at 72 percent in 1976, four years after Gallup’s record keeping began. What’s needed, then, is a return to fundamentals, to the basic principles on which the reciprocal loyalty between the press and the people have long stood. It’s important to consider that trust as it relates to the press doesn’t exist in a vacuum, per se, separate from all other areas of life and society in which trust is an essential pillar. Trust is trust is trust, and, since the birth of humanity it has been an acquired product of a consistent set of ingredients. Academic studies on trust abound. They typically center around a set of habits upon which trusting relationships are built.Some studies offer a wider variety than others, but there are consistent recurring themes. One Harvard Business Review article identifies authenticity, logic, and empathy. Educator Devin Vodicka names consistency, compassion, competence, and communication. Academic Brené Brown offers seven components of what she calls “The Anatomy of Trust.” Reliability, accountability, and integrity are the three most relevant to the field of journalism. When a news outlet that’s actively trailing the scent of corruption in the overseas business dealings of the Trump family works to actively bury the Hunter Biden laptop story, they are telegraphing to the reader a lack of integrity and authenticity. If inflation and the ballooning national debt are worthy of coverage when Democrats are in office and not when Republicans are in office, that’s a mark against the offending publication on reliability. If the plight of migrants illegally entering the United States receives top billing, but not the fate of low-income inner city populations plagued by crime and overburdened resources, some readers may well detect a lack of true empathy and compassion. What’s the logic, a reader may ask, of denying the cognitive decline of the 46th president that was so obvious to the American public? Likewise the failure to cover the full scope of destruction wrought on communities by Black Lives Matter rioters. Contrast that with the breathless coverage of damage to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and the plummeting trust begins to make sense. At the Sun we’ve concentrated our approach to building trust into a simple mantra: Principle over politics, people over party. Our insistence on an editorial culture guided by the Sun’s longstanding principles is essential to ensure reliability, consistency, authenticity, logic and integrity. Compassion, accountability and empathy come from our enduring commitment to “defending the national welfare,” and speaking out “the sentiment of the people in a voice that is true to our motto, ‘It Shines for All.’”So as we again mark this anniversary, and another year of steep growth, we’ll leave to others the business of innovating to build back trust with the American public. We’ll instead hold fast to those finest traditions of American journalism that have served us well since the Sun’s first number 192 years ago. We will not waver. Not now. Not ever. Yours sincerely, Dovid Efune

Letter From the Publisher: the Crisis in Trust and How To Save American Journalism

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