The crisis in journalism

DETROIT—If you are a person of a certain age, it’s odd to drive down a major artery of a large metropolitan American city and strain to find a newspaper box at any of the crossroads.

That’s especially true in a city such as Detroit that has a storied history of competitive journalism that dug deep into holding power in check, whether it was city hall, the unions or large corporations.

It’s not that those papers are gone. The lack of boxes is partly because of contractual delivery systems and partly because of vandalism. But it’s mostly because we consume our news differently.

That consumption is contributing to a crisis in American journalism that benefits no one.

Turn on the television at any given moment of the day and you are likely to hear the anchor say “breaking news” at least 12 times in one hour. Go on Facebook and you’ll see that half of your friends are posting stories from a left-leaning news organization’s take and the other half are posting stories from a right-leaning news organization, and most of them are declaring one or the other “fake news” with lots of words in all capital letters.

Here is the hard truth: No one is exempt. There is a shared responsibility in this lack of trust between the American people and the press, and unless we find a way to unravel it, that mistrust is only going to get worse.

Beginning in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., and New York City newsrooms began to be dominated by people who had the same backgrounds. For the most part they went to the same Ivy League journalism schools, where they made the right contacts and connections to get their jobs. And the journalists who came from working-class roots found it in their best interest to adopt the conventional left-of-center views that were filling the halls of newsrooms.

So when fewer and fewer reporters shared the same values and habits as many of their consumers, inferences in their stories about people of faith and their struggles squaring gay marriage or abortion with their belief systems were picked up by readers.

Then along came the Internet. Different sources were now available, and news aggregators such as Drudge made it easy to find things giving everyone access to “alternative facts.”

The universe of information expanded, and it became clear that what Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or the New York Times told consumers was not the whole story. If you were a conservative (and a plurality of Americans self-identify as center-right), you lost all trust in the mainstream media.

It took 17 years for that pressure to build not only among conservatives but also among Democrats who came from a family of New Deal ideals and became weary of the constant misrepresentation and belittling of the traditions they held dear: church, family, guns and life.

And so the media missed it. They were a little shocked by the support for Sen. Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. They were really shocked by the support candidate Donald J. Trump received in the primaries. And they were really, really shocked by his win.

The problem journalists face right now is that they have never acknowledged his win appropriately, at least not in the eyes of the people who voted for him.

Since the day he won, the inference that his win was illegitimate has been everywhere. It set the tone for the relationship between the voters and the press that has only soured since November of last year.

The press acknowledging Trump’s victory would go a long way to begin winning that trust back with conservatives and his broader coalition of voters.