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What Trump’s win says about America’s trust in journalism

J.Wright4 hr ago
Before Watergate, Nixon had often fantasized with his top aide Roger Ailes about running his own conservative television network. Murdoch was already known in his country and Europe for using his newspapers to push a conservative agenda using misinformation. Murdoch's impulses and Nixon's seemed almost destined to unite eventually, and indeed, decades later when the mogul made the former president's dream come true by creating the conservative network Fox News, Ailes was hired to run it.

A couple other pieces had to fall into place first though. President Reagan obliged. In the '80s, Reagan expedited Murdoch's immigration status, so that as a U.S. citizen, he could buy more of America's media companies. As he took power, Murdoch leaned on editors and producers to reflect his political views and not the truth that journalists found through reporting.

Reagan also pushed to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which had required holders of broadcast licenses to represent multiple sides when covering controversial issues. Freed from that, Murdoch's television stations could say they were "fair and balanced," but they were no longer required by law to actually be so. You know what came next, with the rise of Fox News and the decline of an informed public.

Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward had broken the story of the Watergate burglary and Nixon's involvement, wrote in a magazine piece in 1992 titled "The Idiot Culture": "In retrospect, the Nixon administration's extraordinary campaign to undermine the credibility of the press succeeded to a remarkable extent, despite all the post-Watergate posturing in our profession. It succeeded in large part because of our own obvious shortcomings. The hard and simple fact is that our reporting has not been good enough. It was not good enough in the Nixon years, it got worse in the Reagan years, and it is no better now. We are arrogant. We have failed to open up our own institutions in the media to the same kind of scrutiny that we demand of other powerful institutions in the society. We are no more forthcoming or gracious in acknowledging error or misjudgment than the congressional miscreants and bureaucratic felons we spend so much time scrutinizing."

It all contributed to what we saw last week, when a majority of American voters backed Trump either because they hadn't heard of his worst failings — which is hard to imagine — or because they did not know whether to believe or how to interpret what they had heard about his failings. That sort of world of distrust and confusion is exactly what Gattuso/Reagan/Murdoch/Ailes had hoped to create, so that criminals like Trump could not be held accountable by a free press as the founders intended.

The questions regarding what Democrats did wrong in this election are certainly worth asking. However, the industry of Woodward and Bernstein is in dire need of analysis as well. More than 70 million Americans apparently trusted the words of Trump, a serial liar, and embraced his "fake news" characterization of the industry. There's no getting around it: The 2024 election did not just reflect a new high point for Trump, but also a new low for trust in American journalism.

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