Why No One Trust The News

Ahhhh journalism. I’ve literally devoted my entire professional life to it. I graduated from the first (and still greatest) journalism school on Earth, Mizzou. The same school that has given us ESPN anchor John Anderson, Entertainment Tonight host Nischelle Turner, and pioneering New York Times editor Gerald Boyd. Other notable alumni include CNN Digital’s Meredith Artley and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, highlighting the school’s reputation for producing top industry leaders in media, sports broadcasting, and strategic communication. Heck, we even had Brad Pitt in there for a few years until he discovered acting. Yes, he was there the same time as me and yeah, I knew—of him. (A story for another time).

But, that was then and this is now. And now is an absolute dirty diaper dumpster fire of compromised ethics, bad choices, financial woes leading to mergers, massive layoffs across the field. It’s bad folks. Let’s find out how bad.

According to late 2025 data, trust in journalism has reached a new record low in the U.S., with only 28% of Americans reporting a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television, and radio. Distrust is high, with 34% saying they have “none at all” in mass media. Over half of U.S. adults (57%) have low confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interest, while distrust now exceeds trust in the media.

Let me say this VERY clearly and slowly — The 28% trust level is the LOWEST EVER recorded by Gallup since tracking began in the 1970s, falling from 68% in 1972. As John Wick would say….whoa….consequences.

The PR profession is inexorably tied to the journalism profession. Some might call them two sides of one coin. And their drop in trust, truly just sucks for all PR practitioners everywhere. Because we USE the media FOR trust! That’s our whole game right there. That’s it. That is what we do. And when no one trust THEM, what ARE we supposed to do?

I’ll get to that, but I’d like to point out what I think happened here. I see four factors at play.

Financial/Ownership — the continued $$ losses of newspapers, TV and radio stations for years made them ACQUISITION targets by larger companies. In fact, more than 98 percent of what we see, watch, listen to and read comes from the belly of SIX very large global corporations. Bad ones.

Talent — Well, when you lay off all of the good journalists, you get….bad journalism. We all get that, right? We’ve lost more than 2/3 of the journalism jobs in the past two decades coinciding with the slide in trust in the profession very nicely.

Perception of “Free” Content — Somewhere in the digital age, we all got it into our heads that we no longer had to PAY for news or PAY anyone to create and curate it for us. See, you couldn’t do that earlier – you had to pay for the paper otherwise, you’re uninformed—and so people did. And that, along with classified and display advertising kept our lovely newspapers afloat. But, no pay for content, no people to write = you get the total syndicated uni-party garbage we suffer through today. But it’s OUR fault — we got greedy and killed the golden goose of our own beautiful journalism.

Govt Has More Power — So the fourth estate of journalism is SUPPOSED to keep govt in check. And sometimes it does aka Nick Shirley’s amazing awesome investigations exposing billions in daycare and hospice fraud in Minnesota and California. Now THAT kid deserves a Pulitzer Prize for sure! THAT is some courage and some INCREDIBLE journalism in action. But the govt is POWERFUL today and they can exert influence locally to kill stories and control journalism leading to our lack of trust. Speaking of Nick Shirley, the CA legislature wants to pass a law making INVESTIGATING and REPORTING ON fraud ILLEGAL in that state. Wow! (FYI — SCOTUS will kill that within seconds of being passed due to the MASSIVE infringement on the First Amendment).

So where does that leave us? Up Schiff’s Creek for sure. BTW — that guy (Schiff) just made stuff up and IMPEACHED the President with it. I’m no legal expert, but come on man! Where is the reporting of THAT? ZERO minutes of news coverage on ABC, NBC and CBS about the BILLIONS in fraud discovered in California — come on! Who is getting paid here! Oh, you know the answer, don’t you. Just like Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam, there’s a couple of twins out there CENSORING every reporter’s idea for a story and telling them EXACTLY what the org will and won’t publish. That CENSORSHIP ends journalism.

To me, it really seems like the J-schools like Mizzou and orgs like the PRSA SHOULD be talking about this, right? Historic low trust numbers only getting worse, PR has to rely on paid influencer campaigns and pseudo paid product reviews and news stories because there ain’t any people left to do the damn job anymore. It gets worse, 50 US markets have “ghost papers” aka “no reporters who live in the market to report on the news” What! Silence from everyone about this — well, except me and a few brave pundits out there.

I gotta say, I believe in journalism the way it USED to be done — the way Nick Shirley does it. I hope we can get back there for the sake of PR and the profession formerly known as journalism too. We need to reverse the four levers mentioned above and it can be done. AI isn’t going to be a savior here either — it just pleases its master and its master (in this case) is as corrupt as the day is long.