Issues with todays content creation— by Derek Gerard de Van der Holtz
Is it too much made of the mistrust of journalists? Why has polling shown a lack of trust toward the media and most average people believe it to be true ?
Polling allowed us to measure public confidence in the press and compare it to that in other institutions. Over the decades for which such data has been available, we have seen that people tend to think of journalism in a more favorable light than, say, the White House or Congress, but as less trustworthy than medicine, education, the military, organized religion, or major corporations. It took the cultural revolution of the 1960s to bring down that overgenerous level of deference to the world’s bastions of power — the media.
As for “the media” specifically, before television network news established a settled place in our living rooms (in the mid-to-late 1960s) with its cautious, measured, oh-so-sober and soporific tone, there really was no such thing as “the media.” There were several large metro dailies in essentially all sizable US cities, and they were known to have political commitments one way or another on the editorial page. But “the media” as a general term for what we now call “the mainstream media” wasn’t in common use. Its full entrance into the American vocabulary was strategically promoted by the Nixon White House. To refer to journalists as “the press” ceded them an emotional upper hand, an aura of rectitude and First Amendment privilege. That advantage — unacceptable to Nixon, whose aides sensed that reporters held a bias against him — could be removed by calling journalists “the media.” William Safire, who was a speechwriter for Nixon, describes in his memoir, Before the Fall (1975), how the administration pushed the term “the media.” In the White House, he recalls, “The press became ‘the media’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it.” Nixon judged journalists to be his opponents, Safire remembers, and declared to his staff that “the press is the enemy” a dozen times in Safire’s presence.
The result was what Daniel Kreiss, a media scholar, has called a level of “civic scepticism” appropriate to a democratic society.
