With more than half of Americans claiming they no longer trust media outlets to present reliable information, one industry veteran says journalists need a helping of humble pie.
“I think us in the media, we have to be a little more humble,” Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Axios and Politico, told Kasie Hunt, host of “CNN This Morning.”
“And we have to realize our job is to be clinical in delivering the information,” he said. “Try to get to the closest approximation of the truth. If we screw it up, be humble enough to admit it and maybe get off Twitter and maybe stop popping off in ways that make people distrust the work that you do.”
CEO Jim VandeHei joined @kasie to discuss his new book and the current media landscape.
: @CNNThisMorning | @JimVandeHei | @axios pic.twitter.com/BagUezncVP
— Axios Comms (@AxiosComms) May 2, 2024
They are harsh words, but the mainstream media is experiencing hard times heading into the 2024 elections.
According to a new Associated Press poll, “Although most adults, regardless of age, race or ethnicity, or partisanship, tune into news about elections, only 14% express a great deal of confidence in election-related information they receive from national sources, and 11% say the same about local news media.”
“In particular, people are worried about the news containing misinformation and amplifying divisions,” the survey found. “About half of adults say they are extremely or very concerned about news organizations reporting inaccurate information (53%). Almost as many worry news outlets will report unverified information (47%) or focus too much on divisions or controversies (48%).”
Why, it’s almost like Americans don’t like being lied to and pitted against each other.
The “truth,” it would seem, does matter — even in a world ruled by “likes” and “clicks.”
“I‘ve dedicated my life to trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth,” VandeHei said. “And you have a lot of forces out there that have tried to diminish the work that we do. And, quite frankly, I think there‘s things that people in the media have done to diminish some of the work that we do. But I always tell people, you better step back and be careful with what you‘re playing with here because you‘re playing with fire.”
“I‘m saddened by it, the fact that so many people don‘t trust what we do,” he added.
The AP/Media Insight Project poll discovered that Republicans and Democrats can at least agree on what they want from their news sources.
“Both Democrats and Republicans want national media to report about candidates’ positions on key social issues and policies (Democrats 82% and Republicans 76%) as well as candidates’ values and character (Democrats 81% and Republicans 75%),” it revealed.
A society that “trusts nothing,” VandeHei warned, is one that is “hard to govern.”
“If we suddenly have a country that trusts nothing, and there‘s no sources of common truth, it‘s going to be really hard to govern,” he told Hunt.
“It‘s gonna be really hard to avoid protests and know what‘s really happening on these campuses,” VandeHei said. “And if you look back at the history of the country, a free press is such an awesome, distinctive, needed, necessary, vital piece of this awesome country. And that‘s how we know so much of what‘s happening. It’s how we expose so much malfeasance.”
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Melissa Fine
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.bizpacreview.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.