destroyed by fire, inspiring the newspaper’s grim headline “Come hell and high water.” Still, the papers kept coming. The newsroom was moved to an elementary school, where the news was transmitted to the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota. The papers were printed there and flown to Grand Forks for free distribution to the beleaguered North Dakotans.1
That was public service in journalism’s finest tradition.
But the goodwill soon dissipated in a torrent of criticism. What angered many of the Herald’s readers was its decision to disclose the identity of the donor who had given the towns $15 million and requested anonymity. From that gift, $2,000 was distributed to each of the 7,500 households hardest hit by the flood.
The disclosure was the result of a visit by Joan Kroc, widow of The McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc. When Herald reporters learned that the donor was being given a tour of the flood area, they drove to the airport and established her identity from the tail markings on her private jet, from fuel receipts, and from interviews with airport employees.2 The story began: “Angel was in town Saturday night. So was Joan Kroc’s jet. This appears to be no coincidence.”3
“You owe the community and state an apology, as well as Mrs. Kroc,” one reader wrote in a letter to the editor. Another wrote, “If she was nice enough to give that much money, her wishes should have been respected.” A man who called in to a radio station’s talk show lamented: “The Herald has been wonderful through this whole thing, keeping the paper printed and distributing it for free. … This has ruined it all.”4 The newspaper’s own poll showed that 85 percent of respondents thought Kroc’s name should not have been published.5
The Herald’s decision to name the Angel is addressed here to illustrate the mercurial nature of the public’s attitudes toward the news media. Whether the Herald was right or wrong can be – and has been – debated in journalism circles. It should be noted, however, that the paper did not pursue the matter until the Angel toured the flood area. At that point, her identity became widely known in the community – but only among political and civic leaders. The average citizen was still in the dark.
The Herald explained in a front‐page statement: “[W]e believe printing the news is part of the bargain we have made with the community. We’d be breaking the bargain if we didn’t print the news.”6 Reflecting on that statement later, Herald editor Mike Jacobs told an audience of journalists: “News, we said, is timely information of general interest. The Angel’s identity was clearly news. Besides, we said, if she really wanted to remain anonymous, she should have driven into Grand Forks in a pickup truck. With a gun rack.”7
The controversy in Grand Forks did, in Jacobs’s words, “blow over.” But the newspaper’s precipitous fall from community hero to community villain demonstrates a paradox in American society: People do rely on the information that independent news media provide – and even praise it in times of crisis like September 11 and the flood in Grand Forks. Yet the people who value the information also like to complain, and they are apt to react in anger when they think the media’s agenda differs from their own.
The public’s relationship with the news media is, indeed, one of love and hate.
The Evidence of Public Hostility
It is an irony that, even as the news media have matured and have strived to fulfill an obligation of social responsibility, the public has grown hostile. The hostility is painfully evident to anyone answering the telephone, or reviewing incoming email at news outlets, or perusing the reader comments appended to online news stories, or sampling the dialogue on social media.
There also is empirical proof. With occasional upticks, the public’s declining trust has been documented in surveys since the 1980s.
A Gallup Poll (Fig. 5.1) showed in 2019 that Americans were continuing to be mistrustful of the mass media. Asked if they thought the mass media would report “fully, accurately and fairly,” only 41% expressed “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence. When Gallup first measured trust in the mass media in 1972, 68% of Americans reported that level of trust. By 1997, trust was 53%.8
Gallup pointed to widely divergent opinions held by Republicans and Democrats “in the current highly polarized climate” of the Donald Trump administration. Among Democrats, 69% trusted the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” Among Republicans, only 15% rated the mass media that highly. Gallup found that a majority of Republicans trusted only one source of national news: Fox News.9
In 2020, two other surveys – one by the Pew Research Center and the other a collaborative effort by Gallup and the Knight Foundation – confirmed the public’s skepticism about the news media and revealed dark suspicions about journalists’ conduct. Key findings from those surveys are shown in Fig. 5.2.
The Pew survey showed that only 48% of Americans had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence that journalists “act in the best interest of the public.” 10
Even more troubling, from an ethics standpoint, was Pew’s finding that 44% think reporting mistakes happen because of a desire to mislead the public.11
The Gallup-Knight Foundation survey also found that significant numbers of Americans think reporting is sometimes deliberately wrong. The Gallup-Knight report concluded, “Americans perceive inaccurate news to be intentional – either because the
reporter is misrepresenting the facts (52%) or making them up entirely (28%).”12
To anyone who has worked in a newsroom of a mainstream news outlet, those findings are astonishing. According to the two surveys, roughly half of the people think journalists intentionally mislead the audience, and about a quarter of them think journalists fabricate the news. Students reading this textbook should be aware that a reporter who committed either offense would likely be fired.
Both surveys found that Republicans mistrust journalists’ conduct far more than Democrats.
Gallup conducts a periodic poll on perceived honesty of various occupations ( Fig. 5.3), and its 2019 poll confirmed that the public remains unimpressed with journalists’ ethics.
Gallup’s respondents ranked journalists in the middle of the pack – 11th out of 22 occupations rated. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed thought journalists had “very high” or “high” ethics standards. In Gallup’s survey in 1981, 32% of respondents thought journalists had “high” or “very high” ethical standards. In the 27 surveys since then, all but one of the ratings of journalists have been lower than the 1981 score.13
Explanations for the Hostility
Although public hostility to the news media has been well documented, the reasons for the hostility have not been. Thus the question is open to speculation.
Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute has noted a correlation between the low credibility ratings and relentless attacks on the news media. He says the attacks are coming from many directions, with a persuasive cumulative effect on
